More precisely, the etymology of cybernetics refers to the steerer or helmsman of a ship (the kybernetes). The point is that in the middle of the sea, where the

More precisely, the etymology of cybernetics refers to the steerer or helmsman of a ship (the kybernetes). The point is that in the middle of the sea, where there are no stable landmarks, the helmsman cannot navigate by means of pre-establish, static laws in the vein of a mathematician or philosopher. Instead, through interpreting the meaning of celestial bodies, winds, currents, birds, and so on, they have to continuously check their reasoning - they have to find balance. Navigation, medicine and military strategy all shared this mode of knowledge - cunning [metis] - for the ancient Greeks. Norbert Wiener chose the term cybernetics on the one hand because he was well versed in the classics (he would communicate with his father in Latin, and he wanted to name his popular accompaniment to Cybernetics 'Pandora' but his editor refused and called it the Human Use of Human Beings), and he knew this ancient etymology. He also chose it because the Latinate translation of kybernetes is 'governor', and that's what James Watt called the self regulating device he installed in his seminal steam engine. The fact that calling his project Cybernetics also rooted it in the tradition of James Clarke Maxwell's famous paper 'On Governors' was not lost on Wiener. There's no firm evidence as to why Watt himself called the device a 'governor', however he would have known that in 17C England there was a cottage industry of windmill hackers, effectively, who'd introduced mechanisms to regulate the force of windmill sails upon their grinding stones, and they called these mechanisms 'governors'. In British English a 'governor' is still a term for someone who supervises you.