I wonder if you're looking for cybernetics? The original meaning from the 1940s, not the corrupted science fiction shibboleth. Wikipedia - "The initial focus of cybernetics was on parallels between regulatory feedback processes in biological and technological systems...Wiener introduced the neologism cybernetics to denote the study of 'teleological mechanisms'."
Wikipedia suggests it lost a lot of drive in part because AI and computer science split off from it.
Wikipedia suggests it lost a lot of drive in part because AI and computer science split off from it.