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as key model for thinking about adaptive systems and Ashby's law of requisite
variety, as a tool for thinking realistically about possibilities for adaptive con-
trol. Much of what follows can be understood as a very creative extension of
Ashby's cybernetics into and beyond the world of organizations and manage-
ment. During the 1950s, Beer experimented with a whole range of cybernetic
approaches to management (e.g., Beer 1956), but two ideas quicky came to
dominate his thinking. First, one should think of the factory (or any complex
organization) in analogy with a biological organism. Second, and more spe-
cifically, to be adaptive within an unknowable environment, the factory as
organism should be equipped with an adaptive brain.
Beer laid out an early and striking version of this vision in a paper he
presented to a symposium on self-organization held at the University of Il-
linois's Allerton Park on the 8 and 9 June 1960 (Beer 1962a). He opened the
discussion with the notion of the “automatic factory,” then attracting great
interest, especially in the United States. This was a vision of industrial au-
tomation taken, one might think, to the limit. In the automatic factory, not
only would individual machines and productive operations be controlled by
other machines without human interference, but materials would be auto-
matically routed from one operation to the next. In the “lights out” factory,
as it was sometimes called, the entire production process would thus be con-
ducted by machines, and human labor made redundant—literally as well as
metaphorically.
8
Beer was not at this stage a critic of the automatic factory, except that he did
not feel it was automatic enough. He compared it to a “spinal dog”—that is, a
dog whose nervous system had been surgically disconnected from the higher
levels of its brain. The automatic factory (1962a, 164) “has a certain internal
cohesion, and reflex faculties at the least. [But] When automation has finished
its work, the analogy may be pursued in the pathology of the organism. For
machines with over-sensitive feedback begin to 'hunt'—or develop ataxia; and
the whole organism may be so specialized towards a particular environment
that it ceases to be adaptive: a radical change in the market will lead to its ex-
tinction.” Beer's argument was that to make it adaptive and to avoid extinction
in market fluctuations, the automatic factory would need a brain.
At present, such an automatic factory must rely on the few men left at the top
to supply the functions of a cerebrum. And . . . the whole organism is a strange
one—for its brain is connected to the rest of its central nervous system at dis-
crete intervals of time by the most tenuous of connections. The survival-value
of such a creature does not appear to be high. . . .
