Donald Michie's 1973 symposium comment glosses Lighthill's automation category as 'an outgrowth from control theory' — using the term for the practical-automation tradition, not a mathematical research program
Writing in Part III of the same 1973 Artificial Intelligence: a paper symposium — the publication whose Part I McCarthy's review answers (the symposium itself carries only Lighthill, Sutherland, Needham, Longuet-Higgins, and Michie; McCarthy's review was published separately) — Donald Michie characterizes Lighthill's classification scheme as treating "A as an outgrowth from control theory, B as an outgrowth from science fiction, C as an outgrowth from neurobiology." This is the single place in the symposium where "control theory" (rather than Lighthill's own "control engineering") is used to label one of Lighthill's classification categories — Sutherland's Part II uses the phrase once as well, in a different role, crediting "some applications of control theory and of signal detection theory" as useful within experimental-psychology modelling — and a contemporaneous AI insider uses it to gloss precisely the industrial-automation category (Advanced Automation: automatic landing, guided missiles, factory assembly) that Lighthill's Part I had described in "classical control technology" terms (claim-lighthill-1973-report-describes-automation-as-classical-control-technology).
Michie's usage offers a second, independent contemporaneous reading of what "control theory" denoted inside this specific debate: the applied automation tradition, not the Pontryagin–Bellman–Kalman optimal-control mathematics. It gives no evidence of engagement with LQG, optimal control, or the Kwakernaak–Sivan lineage (claim-kwakernaak-sivan-1972-linear-optimal-control-systems-leading-reference). Michie is a strong witness for the point: an Edinburgh machine-intelligence professor whose own program the report effectively targeted, using the field label himself, in the same debate McCarthy's dismissal comes from. It feeds the corpus-wide finding at claim-1973-lighthill-symposium-names-no-optimal-control-lqg-lineage. See moc-backpropagation-origins.
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“Sir James has arrived at his position by interpreting AI as consisting merely of outgrowths from a number of established areas, viz.: A as an outgrowth from control theory, B as an outgrowth from science fiction, C as an outgrowth from neurobiology”
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