Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1.1.
The cyborg family. source: de latil 1956, facing p. 34.
quasi-biological electrochemical computers that could evolve new senses,
and within a decade he was designing buildings that could reconfigure them-
selves in “conversation” with their users. In 1959 Stafford Beer published a
topic imagining an automated factory controlled by a biological computer—
perhaps a colony of insects or perhaps a complex ecosystem such as a pond.
By the early 1970s, he was redesigning the “nervous system” of the Chilean
economy at the invitation of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Examples like these convey some of the flavor of the history explored in
the following chapters. In this chapter and the next I want to discuss more
generally what cybernetics is, or was, and why it interests me. (The tense is
difficult; cybernetics as a field is alive today, but the main characters of this
topic are all now dead. I will tend therefore to speak of cybernetics in the past
tense, as referring to a historical body of work.)
