Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems such as a regulated steam engine and human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950). When asked why he had chosen the name cybernetics, Wiener replied, "I didn't know what else to call it."
Clynes & Kline popularized the term amongst the masses.
Cybernetics is associated in many people's minds with robotics, due to uses such as Douglas Adams' Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and the concept of a cyborg. In scholarly terms, however, it is the study of systems and control in an abstracted sense - that is, it is not grounded in any empirical field.
Related fields: systems theory, complex systems
See also: cyborg