The analogy between organisms and machines appears, at first glance, to be an issue of epistemic translation between the disciplines of engineering and biology, but, in fact, it points to a more profound attitude of cybernetic engineering: What are the ethical implications of seeing an industrial machine as an organism, a living being? As much as ‘computer science’, cybernetics was not a science but an artificial language, a manual of instructions for machine components – a ‘machine semiotics’ which happened to be forcibly translated into an ontology of nature.
