GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 336

Cybernetician .—Which costs you £2,000.
Manager .—Nonsense, Bill Smith enjoys the job. He is a responsible chap, and
helps to sober up the hot heads, no it's worth every penny.
Cybernetician .—Very well, as you please. Just one other enquiry, though. What
is an appropriate model for this process? What does it seem like to manage a
piston ring plant?
Manager .—It's like sailing a boat.
Cybernetician .—Yes.
In case the reader might miss the significance of that final “yes,” Pask com-
ments that “they might continue to infuriate each other indefinitely.” This
“cybernetician” is infuriated because he wants to extract some rules from
the manager that can be run on a computer, or perhaps find some statistical
regularity between the firm's inputs and outputs that can be likewise encoded.
The manager, in contrast, insists that running the factory is not like that; that
genuinely novel solutions to problems are sometimes necessary, solutions
not given in prior practice and thus not capturable in algorithms, like spend-
ing £2,000 just to keep Bill Smith happy for the overall good of the firm.
Hence his very cybernetic final reply, that managing a firm is like sailing a
boat—a performative participation in the dynamics of a system that is never
fully under control (taking us straight back to Wiener's derivation of “cyber-
netics,” and reminding us, for example, of Brian Eno's approach to musical
composition).
In this essay, Pask makes it clear that he does not take the search for algo-
rithms to be the defining aspect of cybernetics. People who take that approach
are “rightly electronic engineers examining their particular kinds of hypoth-
eses about managers” (Pask 1958, 171). In effect, Pask makes here much the
same contrast I made in the opening chapter between symbolic AI and the
branch of cybernetics that interests me and to which Pask and our other prin-
cipals devoted themselves. Pask was interested in machines that could sail
boats, to which we can now turn. We can look at how Pask's chemical comput-
ers functioned, and then how they might substitute for human managers.
Threads
Figure 7.11 is a schematic of a chemical computer. A set of electrodes dips
down vertically into a dish of ferrous sulphate solution. As current is passed
through the electrodes, filaments of iron—“threads” as Pask called them—