from kuber- to guber—the root of “gubernatorial” and “governor,” another term for masculine control, deployed by James Watt to describe his 19th-century device for modulating a runaway steam engine. Cybernetics thus took ideas that had long analogized people and devices and generalized them to an applied science by adding that “-ics.” Wiener’s three c’s (command, control, communication) drew on the mathematics of probability to formalize systems (whether biological or mechanical) theorized as a set of inputs of information achieving outputs of actions in an environment—a muscular, fleshy agenda often minimized in genealogies of AI. But the etymology does little to capture the excitement felt by participants, as mathematics joined theoretical biology (Arturo Rosenblueth) and information theory (Claude Shannon, Walter Pitts, Warren McCulloch) to produce a barrage of interdisciplinary research and publications viewed as changing not just the way science was done but the way future humans would engage with the technosphere. As Wiener put it, “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist.”48 The pressing question is: How are we modifying ourselves? Are we going in the right direction or have we lost our way, becoming the tools of our tools? Revisiting the early history of humanist/artists’ contribution to cybernetics may help direct us toward a less perilous, more ethical future. The year 1968 was a high-water mark of the cultural diffusion and artistic uptake of the term. In that year, the Howard Wise gallery opened its show of Wen-Ying Tsai’s “Cybernetic Sculpture” in midtown Manhattan, and Polish émigré Jasia Reichardt opened her exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at London’s ICA. (The “Cybernetic” in her title was intended to evoke “made by or with computers,” even though most of the artworks on view had no computers, as such, in their responsive circuits.) The two decades between 1948 and 1968 had seen both the