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Figure 7.13. training a chemical computer. source: Pask 1958, 169, diagram 2.
pattern of behaviour. The manager may thus be removed and the assemblage
will act as an organic control mechanism in the industry” (169).
Not much new commentary is needed here. As ontological theater, Pask's
chemical computers were in much the same space as Beer's biological ones,
staging a direct performative coupling between exceedingly complex dynamic
systems (the threads, the factory, the manager) free from any representational
detour—a coupling originally enacted by Musicolour in Pask's career and that
could take us all the way back to Walter's tortoises, except that the threads
displayed more variety than the tortoise and, of course, they grew without any
painstaking design, exploiting the liveliness of matter instead (and taking us
back to Ashby's thoughts on evolutionary design in chapter 4, as well as Beer
in chapter 6). As I said in the previous chapter, I am struck by the imagination
required to even begin contemplating the use of an electrochemical device
such as this as an adaptive controller for any sort of system. It is hard to imag-
ine arriving at such a vision within the symbolic AI tradition, for example.
But there is another striking feature of Pask's chemical computers that re-
mains to be discussed. We have forgotten about Bill Smith. His function in the
hypothetical conversation with the cybernetician is to introduce a consider-
ation of what Pask called the “relevance conditions” for control systems, the
question of what variables the system needs to pay attention to, the ones that
figure as its inputs and outputs. Bill Smith's contentedness was not something
the manager needed to think about under the old regime of production—Bill
was happy enough—but suddenly becomes a key variable when the new ma-
chine is installed and his work is deskilled. Now, it is one thing to design a
control system when these relevance conditions are fixed and known in ad-
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