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Lots of ink spilled on "Loop engineering", but no one seems to connect it to its much older name: Cybernetics. Maybe by the year's end, we'll recognize that it was all Control Theory engineering all along.

The "loop" everyone's excited about (perceive state, compare to goal, act, observe, repeat) has been the fundamental architecture for goal-directed systems since 1948. We keep rediscovering cybernetics. And it's very much connected to precursor-AI. x.com/omarsar0/st...

Norbert Wiener coined "cybernetics" from the Greek kybernētēs, or "steersman." The field was about one question: how does a system observe its own state, compare it to a goal, and act to close the gap? His canonical example was a gun turret tracking an aircraft.

This wasn't adjacent to early AI. It *was* early AI. Warren McCulloch organized ten conferences from 1946–1953; formally titled "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems." The goal: a unified theory of mind and machine. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_c...

Wiener (cybernetics), von Neumann (computer arch, game theory...too many to name), Shannon (info theory) were all in the same room. The question "can a machine regulate itself toward a goal?" was the question of both cybernetics and AI. Same project, before the fields diverged.

This pattern didn't stay in academia. Google's Kubernetes is named deliberately from kybernētēs. This isn't a coincidence. The designers knew exactly what they were building: a system that regulates itself toward a desired state in the presence of disturbances.

Actually we were unaware of the deep history of the term and the connection to cybernetics. We just needed something that would clear legal trademark review. It was a very happy accident. And anyone who is Greek will tell you how we absolutely butcher the pronunciation.

Haha! It seemed such a straightforward through line that I wouldn’t have thought the connection to cybernetic was a happy accident. But at least the meaning of “helmsman” was deliberate, I venture?

That's why Kubernetes is all declarative programming with YAML files. You declare the state of the system that you want your cluster to be in, and the underlying system works to return to that state under perturbations like CPU, disks, and network going down or influx of traffic.

Its controller manager watches actual cluster state, compares it to desired state, and corrects continuously. Every reconciliation loop is a closed-loop regulator responding to hardware going up and down. Kubernetes is applied cybernetics. Explicitly.