I think the author massively underestimates how ahead of his time Weiner was and how relevant cybernetics is right now and how important it will become. I've been studying and working on cybernetics for a while now and have become a true believer in classic cybernetics as a way forward to develop better/smarter networked apps and especially for things like speech recognition and smart homes.

I've been developing a startup project building a cybernetic control system in JavaScript that makes extensive use of feedback loops that get dynamically spawned between devices and services and it is truly marvelous to see the full system in action. I'm getting capabilities out of the system that I didn't even foresee being able to do, like being able to write fully voice-controlled chess game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faOfKd1eAQA

That was just a fun side-project too. With a true cybernetic control layer running between the speech recognition system and the things you want to control building apps like this becomes relatively straight-forward, perhaps not easy but a lot easier than it would be without one.

I am quite busy in a rewrite of the whole system, not a whole lot of documentation yet:

https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore

I'll be rewriting the speech recognition system as well and integrating it better into the new version, I wrote a bit of a writeup here about how Mozilla's DeepSpeech can be hooked into the web:

https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore-listen

And there's hardware aspect of the project as well, I created a new cybernetic control dial that gets hooked into the Jaxcore to control all sorts of things like stereo equipment, wireless speakers, and can control pretty much anything in a super elegant way.