It was originally meant to suggest a metaphor between marine navigation and a feedback device that governs a mechanical system, such as a thermostat. Wiener recognized and humanely explored the extraordinary reach of this metaphor, one of the most powerful ever expressed. I hope no one will think I'm equating cybernetics and what I'm calling cybernetic totalism. The distance between recognizing a great metaphor and treating it as the only metaphor is the same as the distance between humble science and dogmatic religion. Cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.
People are no more than cybernetic patterns.
Subjective experience either doesn't exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect. What Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture. Qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of information systems will be inexorably accelerated by Moore's law. To be a human after that moment will be either impossible or something very different than we now can know. Recently, public attention has finally been drawn to number six, the astonishing belief in an eschatological cataclysm in our lifetimes, brought about when computers become the ultra-intelligent masters of physical matter and life.