RSA Animation: The Power of Networks

[reggie]

Very nice intro to the paradigm shift that's well underway in every aspect of human existence....

What the video doesn't discuss is all the reasons why human systems are making this transition, and the impact on society of this monumental shift.

Of course, this ties into our economic systems, and I will start to make that connection in subsequent posts.

[reggie]

Re: RSA Animation: The Power of Networks

Peter Senge, from MIT, discussing the need to develop interrogation methods that will allow us to uncover knowns that are previously unknown and unknowable, with the goal of determing "leverage points' that will enable "alteration" and "control' of said system.

[reggie]

Re: RSA Animation: The Power of Networks

John Moore University in Manchester: Stafford Beer explains how cybernetics is involved in a democracy. This conference is more than 30 years young. Stafford makes a strong case for his approach to management using the idea of VARIETY.

Beer's Involvement in Allende's Chile

During the administration of Salvador Allende in Chile, in the early 1970s, Beer was closely involved with a visionary project, Cybersyn, to apply his cybernetic theories in government. The project's ultimate goal was to create a network of computers and communications equipment that would support the management of the state-run sector of Chile's economy; at its core would be an operations room where government managers could view important information about economic processes in real time, formulate plans of action, and transmit advice and directives to managers at plants and enterprises in the field. However, consistent with cybernetic principles and the ideals of the Allende government, its designers aimed to preserve worker and lower-management autonomy instead of implementing a top-down system of centralized control.

The system used a network of about 500 telex machines located at enterprises throughout the country and in government offices in Santiago, some of which were connected to a government-operated mainframe computer that would receive information on production operations, feed that information into economic modeling software, and report on variables (such as raw material supplies) that were outside normal parameters and might require attention. The project, implemented by a multidisciplinary group of both Chileans and foreigners, reached an advanced prototype stage, but was interrupted by the 1973 coup d'état.

Designing Freedom
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Free.../dp/047195165X



Distinguished cyberneticist Stafford Beer states the case for a new science of systems theory and cybernetics. His essays examine such issues as The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear, The Discarded Tools of Modern Man, A Liberty Machine in Prototype, Science in the Service of Man, The Future That Can Be Demanded Now, The Free Man in a Cybernetic World.

Designing Freedom ponders the possibilities of liberty in a cybernetic world.

"Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world's most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." Dr Russell L Ackoff.

Based on the Massey Lectures, this book examines the reasons why the institutions of our society may well be failing, and opens a discussion as to what could be done. Drawing on the science of effective organization, which is his definition of cybernetics, Stafford Beer explains key cybernetic principles in words and pictures that all can understand. He concludes that our society commits more and more resources to plastering over the cracks in the system which simply reappear, while freedom itself is increasingly eroded. The institutions must be redesigned, and returned to the people, to whom the scientific tools for doing this ought to belong.