The book laid the theoretical foundation for servomechanisms (whether electrical, mechanical or hydraulic), automatic navigation, analog computing, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and reliable communications.

He details the interdisciplinary nature of his approach and refers to his work with Vannevar Bush and his differential analyzer (a primitive analog computer), as well as his early thoughts on the features and design principles of future digital calculating machines.

He points out that in fact, even in the case of astronomy, tidal forces between the planets introduce a degree of decay over cosmological time spans, and so strictly speaking Newtonian mechanics do not precisely apply.

This chapter opens with a review of the – entirely independent and apparently unrelated – work of two scientists in the early 20th century: Willard Gibbs and Henri Lebesgue.

Wiener claims that the Lebesgue integral had unexpected but important implications in establishing the validity of Gibbs' work on the foundations of statistical mechanics.

It deals with the transmission or recording of a varying analog signal as a sequence of numerical samples, and lays much of the groundwork for the development of digital audio and telemetry over the past six decades.

This chapter and the next one form the core of the foundational principles for the developments of automation systems, digital communications and data processing which have taken place over the decades since the book was published.

Virtually all of the principles which Wiener enumerated as being desirable characteristics of calculating and data processing machines have been adopted in the design of digital computers, from the early mainframes of the 1950s to the latest microchips.

Wiener opens this chapter with the disclaimers that he is neither a psychopathologist nor a psychiatrist, and that he is not asserting that mental problems are failings of the brain to operate as a computing machine.

Such a possibility seemed entirely fanciful to most commentators in the 1940s, bearing in mind the state of computing technology at the time, although events have turned out to vindicate the prediction – and even to exceed it.

Starting with an examination of the learning process in organisms, Wiener expands the discussion to John von Neumann's theory of games, and the application to military situations.

The context of this discussion was to draw attention to the need for caution in delegating to machines the responsibility for warfare strategy in an age of Nuclear weapons.

[7] Maxwell Maltz titled his pioneering self-development work "Psycho-Cybernetics" in reference to the process of steering oneself towards a pre-defined goal by making corrections to behaviour.

In 1954, Marie Neurath produced a children's book Machines which seem to Think [1], which introduced the concepts of Cybernetics, control systems and negative feedback in an accessible format.