STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 234

However, the culturing difficulties proved enormous. Euglena showed a dis-
tressing tendency to lie doggo, and attempts to isolate a more motile strain
failed. So pure cultures were difficult to handle. Moreover, they are not,
perhaps, ecologically stable systems. Dr. Gilbert, who had been trying to im-
prove the Euglena cultures, suggested a potent thought. Why not use an en-
tire ecological system, such as a pond? . . . Accordingly, over the past year, I
have been conducting experiments with a large tank or pond. The contents of
the tank were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey. Cur-
rently there are a few of the usual creatures visible to the naked eye ( Hydra ,
Cyclops , Daphnia , and a leech); microscopically there is the expected multitude
of micro-organisms. [The coupling is via light sources and photocells, as in the
Euglena experiments.] . . . The state of this research at the moment is that I
tinker with this tank from time to time in the middle of the night. (Beer 1962b,
31-32)
Clearly, however, Beer failed to enroll the pond ecosystem, too, as a U-
machine. The cybernetic factory never got beyond the simulation stage; we
do not live in a world where production is run by Daphnia and leeches, and
Beer's 1962 status report proved to be a requiem for this work. I now want
to comment on it ontologically and sociologically, before moving on to later
phases in Beer's career in management.
Ontology and design
The sheer oddity of trying to use a pond to manage a factory dramatizes the
point that ontology makes a difference. If one imagines the world as populated
by a multiplicity of interacting exceedingly complex systems, as modelled by
Ashby's homeostats, then one just might come up with this idea. It follows
on from what has gone before, though even then some sort of creative leap is
required. In contrast, it is hard to see how one would ever come to think this
way from a modern technoscientific perspective. One would think instead of
trying to program a computer to do the job of management, but that is a very
different approach, in ways that are worth pondering.
We could start with issues of representation and performance. In the dis-
cussion that followed Beer's presentation at the 1960 Allerton conference,
Beer made an interesting contrast between digital and biological computing
in just these terms. When the subject of the former came up, he remarked that
“this analogy with computers I do not like for two reasons.” One had to do with
the dynamics of memory and whether memory should be understood like the