Response to Control in an Information Rich World

Feedback is the process of sensing the changes in certain variables and inputting the gathered information to the control. Through feedback, the control determines the necessary changes that is required for the system. Feedback is part of a closed loop control, where the outcome of the control can be altered through feedback. Without feedback, the control would be open loop, where the system would just have to deal with the outcome of the control without having the ability to change anything. 

Control in a feedback control mechanism takes in the information provided by the feedback and figures out the necessary action that it must take to satisfy the desired conditions. Then it implements the changes to the system. 
Today, computers perform an important role in control because they are able to process a lot of information and provide action accordingly.

The article highlights the future uses of feedback and control should focus on making the most use of technology that improves the level of sensing changes and providing action. It also mentions how there could be a more sophisticated decision making mechanism that could respond to a wider range situations (even failures of systems) with more reliability.  


As a Physics major, my attention gravitated towards the blurb about how feedback control can be applied to quantum physics. Physicists try to lessen the gap between quantum mechanics and classical physics by showing that quantum mechanical system under certain conditions behaves like a classical system. This can be quite difficult to prove since the quantum mechanical natures are probabilistic and not definite. The author mentions how feedback control can be used to continuously observe the quantum mechanical system and use the feedback to show that it can be reduced to classical mechanics. The control and feedback also be used to analyze experimental data and compare it to the theories and strengthen the validity of quantum physics. 
It was interesting to know that control is not only used for developing new technology, but also serves a role in analyzing large data sets and has a potential for making advancements in a wide range of fields.


It seems like feedback control can provide many benefits in terms of developing new technology, improved transportation devices, processing and controlling information, and gaining insight into biological systems. However, it would also be interesting to see some of the risks that can come along with developing such highly sophisticated controls.