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to a formal, set-theoretic definition of its contents and their relations. This is
not the place to go into the details of the formalism; for present purposes, the
important components of the diagram are arranged around the circumfer-
ence: the T- and V-machines at the left and right, bridged by the U-machine
and “states of the world” at the bottom. The symbols within the circumfer-
ence represent processes internal to the U-machine.
Beer envisaged the T-machine as something like Pitts and McCulloch's
scanning device (Pitts and McCulloch 1947, discussed in chap. 3) updated
in the light of more recent neurophysiological research. The “senses” of the
T-machine would be numerical inputs representing the state of the factory's
environmment (supplies and orders, finance) and its internal state (stocks,
performance measures, etc.). The function of the T-machine was “scansion,
grouping and pattern recognition” (Beer 1962a, 173). It would, that is, turn
atomistic raw data into a meaningful output, in much the same way as the hu-
man brain picks out “universals” from our sensory data. The V-machine was
conceived essentially as a T-machine running backward. Its inputs would be
framed in the language of T-machine outputs; its outputs would be instruc-
tions to the motor organs of the plant—directing production operations and
flows, ordering stock, or whatever.
Between the T- and V-machines lay, yes, the U-machine. The U-machine
was to be “some form of Ashbean ultrastable machine” (Beer 1962a, 189)—a
homeostat, the brain artifact of the firm. The job of the U-machine was con-
tinually to reconfigure itself in search of a stable and mutually satisfactory
relationship between the firm and its environment. The U-machine was thus
the organ that would enable the factory to cope with an always fluctuating
and changing, never definitively knowable environment. It was the organ that
could take the automatic factory to a level of consciousness beyond that of a
spinal dog. Figure 6.5
summed up Beer's abstract presentation, accompanied
by the words “The temptation to make the outline look like a coronal section
of the living brain was irresistible and I apologize to cerebra everywhere for
such insolence” (197).
9
The second major section of Beer's essay was a progress report on how
far he had gone toward realizing a cybernetic factory at the Templeborough
Rolling Mills, a division of United Steel engaged in the manufacture of steel
rods.
10
This can help us think more concretely about the cybernetic factory,
and here we need to refer to figure 6.6.
The top level of the diagram repre-
sents various material systems relating to the flow of steel within the plant
and their interconnections: the “Supplying system” feeds the “Input stocking
system” which feeds the “Producing system.” and so on. The next level down,
