In the late 40s, new science was born, namely cybernetics. It's main goal was to show the qualitative unity of interactions in living and non-living systems, regardless the scale. In western democracies, cybernetics has been abandoned relatively quickly whereas in eastern socialist countries it kept it's respect much longer. The author presents the main ideas of cybernetics, main fields of research and how it influenced other fields of science. He also presents it's main Polish contributors. In the final part, he shows the causes and consequences of increasing lack of interest in this field.