Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Though Beer had not fully achieved his ambition, the establishment of the
Department of Cybernetics at Brunel was the zenith of the institutional
career of cybernetics in Britain, and we shall see in the next chapter that
Pask made good use of his position there in training a third generation of
cyberneticians. Characteristically, the trajectory of cybernetics in Britain
was further refracted at Brunel, with Pask's PhD students focusing on such
topics as teaching machines and architecture. The Brunel department
closed down in the early 1980s, and, given the lack of other institutional
initiatives, these students were once more left to improvise a basis for their
careers.
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In the 1960s, then, Beer helped find academic positions for three of Brit-
ain's leading cyberneticians and played a major role in establishing an aca-
demic department of cybernetics. Conversely, as remarked already, in 1974
Beer effectively deinstitutionalized himself in moving to a cottage in Wales.
Partly, as I said, this was an aspect of an overall shift in lifestyle; partly it was a
response to events in Chile. Partly, too, I think, it was a reflection of his failure
in the later 1960s to persuade Britain's Labour government of the importance
of cybernetics. He wrote of his “disappointment in the performance of Har-
old Wilson's 'white heat of technology' government. This was operating at a
barely perceptible glow, and the ministers with whom I had been trying to
design a whole new strategy for national computing failed to exert any real
clout. There were five ministers involved—the Postmaster General himself
(John Stonehouse) 'did a runner' and was discovered much later in Australia”
(S. Beer 2001, 556). Beer was an exceptionally well connected spokesman for
cybernetics in the 1960s, but the fruits of his efforts were relatively few. As he
once put it to me, speaking of the sixties, “the Establishment beat us” (phone
conversation, 3 June 1999).
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The afterlife of Biological Computing
Neither Beer nor Pask ever repudiated his biological computer work; both
continued to mention it favorably after the 1960s. In his 1982 popular topic,
Micro Man
, Pask discusses a variety of “maverick machines,” including his
electrochemical systems, which he describes as “dendritic.” He mentions that
improved versions of them have been built by R. M. Stewart in California and
comments that “there is now a demand for such devices, which are appro-
priate to non-logical forms of computation, but dendrites . . . are physically
too cumbersome for such demand to be met practically. It now seems that
