STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 237

human manager of the factory. But the important point to note is that the
pond was not envisaged as an identical substitute for the human. We will see
in the next chapter that Pask, who thought this through in print further than
Beer, was clear that biological computers would have their own management
style, not identical to any human manager—and that we would, indeed, have
to find out what that style was, and whether we could adapt to and live with it.
This is the sense in which this form of cybernetic design in the thick of things
is a stance of revealing rather than enframing.
One last thought in this connection. Somewhere along the line when one
tries to get grips with Beer on biological computing, an apparent paradox
surfaces. Beer's goal, all along, was to improve management. The cybernetic
factory was supposed to be an improvement on existing factories with their
human managers. And yet the cybernetic brain of the factory was supposed
to be a colony of insects, some dead leaves for them to feed on, the odd leech.
Did Beer really think that his local pond was cleverer than he was? In a way,
the answer has to be that he did, but we should be clear what way that was. Re-
call that Beer thought that the economic environment of the factory was itself
an exceedingly complex system, ultimately unknowable and always becoming
something new. He therefore felt that this environment would always be set-
ting managers problems that our usual modes of cognition are simply unable
to solve. This connects straight back to the above remarks on Beer's scepticism
toward representational knowledge. On the other hand, according to Beer,
biological systems can solve these problems that are beyond our cognitive ca-
pacity. They can adapt to unforeseeable fluctuations and changes. The pond
survives. Our bodies maintain our temperatures close to constant whatever
we eat, whatever we do, in all sorts of physical environments. It seems more
than likely that if we were given conscious control over all the parameters that
bear on our internal milieu, our cognitive abilities would not prove equal to
the task of maintaining our essential variables within bounds and we would
quickly die. This, then, is the sense in which Beer thought that ecosystems are
smarter than we are—not in their representational cognitive abilities, which
one might think are nonexistent, but in their performative ability to solve
problems that exceed our cognitive ones. In biological computers, the hope
was that “solutions to problems simply grow ” (1962a, 211).
The Social Basis of Beer's Cybernetics
At United Steel, Beer was the director of a large operations research group,
members of which he involved in the simulation of the cybernetic factory at