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of institutional support.
36
That his work on DAMS had lapsed for some time
by 1957 is evident in the continuation of the note: “In addition, my theoretical
grasp is slowly getting bogged down for lack of real contact with real things.
And the deadline of May 1960 will
force
me to develop the practical & im-
mediate” (p. 5747).
Ashby's strained optimism of 1957 was misplaced. A year later, on 29 Sep-
tember 1958, we find him writing (pp. 6058-60): “The new DAMS . . . having
fizzled out, a new idea occurs to me today—why not make a small DAMS,
not for experimental purposes but
purely
for demonstration. . . . The basic
conception is that all proofs are elsewhere, in print probably; the machine is
intended purely to enable the by-stander to see what the print means & to get
some intuitive, physical, material feeling for what it is about. (Its chief virtue
will be that it will teach me, by letting me see something actually do the things
I think about.)
Summary
: Build devices for demonstration.” The drift in this
passage from DAMS to demonstration machines is significant. After a break,
the same journal entry continues poignantly: “The atmosphere at Namur
(Internatl. Assoc. for Cybs., 2-9 Sep.) showed me that I am now regarded
more as a teacher than as a research worker. The world wants to hear what I
have
found out, & is little interested in future developments. Demonstration
should therefore be my line, rather than exploration. In this connexion it oc-
curs to me that building many small machines, each to show just one point,
may be easier (being reducible) than building a single machine that includes
the lot.
Summary
: Build small specialist machines, each devised to show
one
fact with perfect clarity.” A formally beautiful but personally rather sad tech-
nosocial adjustment is adumbrated in this note. In it, Ashby responds to two
or possibly three resistances that he felt had arisen in his research. The one
that he failed to mention must have been his lack of technical success in de-
veloping DAMS as a synthetic brain. The second was the escalating cost and
lack of commensurate institutional support for developing DAMS, as just dis-
cussed. And the third was what he perceived, at least, to be a developing lack
of interest in his research in the European cybernetics community. How far he
was correct in this perception is difficult to judge; it is certainly true, however,
that youngsters like Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask were bursting onto the
scene by the late 1950s—Beer was thirty-four in 1958, Pask thirty-two; Ashby
was becoming a grand old man of cybernetics at the age of fifty-four. And all of
these resistances were accommodated by Ashby's strategy. Technically, build-
ing small demonstration machines presented him with a finite task (unlike
the never-ending difficulties with DAMS as a research machine), reduced the
cost to a bearable level, and, socially, positioned Ashby as a pedagogue.
