Literature Survey — Autonomy, Collaboration, and Knowledge Across Traditions

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:00:00 +0100

This survey grounds the autonomy agreement proposal in prior work across five domains: cybernetics, pedagogy, AI alignment, anthropology of knowledge, and existing ML tools. The goal is not comprehensiveness but to identify the intellectual ancestors, locate the genuine novelty, and find the blind spots.

1. Cybernetics (1940s–present)

Ashby: Requisite Variety

The Law of Requisite Variety (1956): a controller must have at least as much variety as the system it controls. The Good Regulator Theorem (Conant & Ashby, 1970): every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.

Survey on MayaLucIA

Literature Survey — Autonomy, Collaboration, and Knowledge Across Traditions

1. Cybernetics (1940s–present)

Ashby: Requisite Variety