When reading some of Stanislaw Lem’s stories as a young adult, I first stumbled across the word ‘cyberneticists’ - basically denoting a tech wizard in the eyes of my younger self. Ever since reading Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain - Sketches for another Future I think that this early impression was basically justified. In many ways cybernetics is the less successful but actually more brilliant twin of the poster child discipline of artificial intelligence (AI). Here I will explore why cybernetics was in many ways superior to AI, why it can still teach us a few important insights about the mind, and why cybernetics is relevant to the question of whether intelligent machines are dangerous for their creators.