Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It was clear enough, then, what the U-machine should do, though in 1960
Beer still had no clear vision of how it should be made, and at Templeborough
“management itself,” meaning the actual human managers of the plant, “plays
the role of the U-Machine” (Beer 1962a, 208). The state of the art was thus
that by that date a cybernetic factory had been simulated, though not actually
built. Beer was confident that he could construct automated versions of the T-
machine, as the factory's sensory organ, and the V-machine, as its motor-organ
equivalent. Neither of these had actually been constructed, but their working
parts had been simulated by OR studies and data collection and transforma-
tion procedures. The U-machine, which figured out the desirable place for the
factory to sit in the factory-environment phase space, continued to be purely
human, simulated by the managers who would review the “gestalt memory”
generated by the T-machine and figure out how to translate that into action
via the inputs to the V-machine. The U-machine, then, was the key (209):
As far as the construction of cybernetic machinery is concerned, it is clear that
the first component to transcend the status of mere exemplification must be
the U-Machine. For exemplifications of T- and V-input are already available,
and can be fed to a U-Machine in parallel with their equivalent reporting to
management. . . . Having succeeded in operating the cybernetic U-Machine,
the research will turn to constructing cybernetic T- and V-Machines. . . . After
this, management would be free for the first time in history to manage, not the
company in the language of the organism, but the T-U-V(R) control assembly
in a metalanguage.
But what was the U-machine to be? Beer ended his talk at Allerton Park with
the words “Before long a decision will be taken as to which fabric to use in the
first attempt to build a U-Machine in actual hardware (or colloid, or protein)”
(212). Colloid or protein?
Biological Computing
Beer's thinking about the U-machine was informed by some strikingly imagi-
native work that he and Pask engaged in in the 1950s and early 1960s, both
separately and together—work that continued Ashby's goal of a synthetic
brain but with an original twist. Ashby had built an adaptive electromagnetic
device, the homeostat, which he argued illuminated the go of the adaptive
brain. Following his lead, Beer and Pask realized that the world is, in effect,
already full of such brains. Any adaptive biological system is precisely an
