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Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance
This contribution offers reflections about Chilean Cybersyn, 50 years ago. In recent years, Cybersyn, has received significant attention. It was the brainchild of Stafford Beer, who conceived it to support the transformation of the Chilean economy from its bureaucratic history to hopefully create a...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer London
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8726523/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35002095 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01348-0 |
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author | Espejo, Raul |
author_facet | Espejo, Raul |
author_sort | Espejo, Raul |
collection | PubMed |
description | This contribution offers reflections about Chilean Cybersyn, 50 years ago. In recent years, Cybersyn, has received significant attention. It was the brainchild of Stafford Beer, who conceived it to support the transformation of the Chilean economy from its bureaucratic history to hopefully create a vibrant and modern society, driven by cybernetic tools. These aspects have received much attention in recent times; however, in this contribution, I want to discuss how working in Cybersyn influenced my work after the coup of 1973. Perhaps, for me, its major influence was in the management of complexity, through what I refer here as variety engineering and through the Viable System Model VSM as a paradigm to the management of relationships with implications to enterprises, society and the economy. After the 1973 coup major interest was in technological aspects of Cybersyn such as real-time management and its contribution to decision support and executive information systems. In the late 70s I was personally influenced by information management, but by the early 1980s my work moved towards methodological aspects of how to use the VSM. By 1989 I had created the VIPLAN method (Espejo, 1989). Key questions I attempted to answer were, how to model the complexity of enterprises and their interactions with environmental agents. Later on, in the 1990s and 2000s, the main direction of my work was epistemological, ontological and methodological towards second-order cybernetics and relationships. Only in recent decades the political transformations proposed by Cybersyn have captured the imagination of many commentators. The confluence of social and cultural changes with information technology, data models, artificial intelligence, algorithms and several additional technological developments have challenged the excesses of capitalism, particularly after the banking crisis of 2008–2009. The purpose in this paper is discussing this evolution in the light of those early days in Chile. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8726523 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer London |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-87265232022-01-05 Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance Espejo, Raul AI Soc Original Article This contribution offers reflections about Chilean Cybersyn, 50 years ago. In recent years, Cybersyn, has received significant attention. It was the brainchild of Stafford Beer, who conceived it to support the transformation of the Chilean economy from its bureaucratic history to hopefully create a vibrant and modern society, driven by cybernetic tools. These aspects have received much attention in recent times; however, in this contribution, I want to discuss how working in Cybersyn influenced my work after the coup of 1973. Perhaps, for me, its major influence was in the management of complexity, through what I refer here as variety engineering and through the Viable System Model VSM as a paradigm to the management of relationships with implications to enterprises, society and the economy. After the 1973 coup major interest was in technological aspects of Cybersyn such as real-time management and its contribution to decision support and executive information systems. In the late 70s I was personally influenced by information management, but by the early 1980s my work moved towards methodological aspects of how to use the VSM. By 1989 I had created the VIPLAN method (Espejo, 1989). Key questions I attempted to answer were, how to model the complexity of enterprises and their interactions with environmental agents. Later on, in the 1990s and 2000s, the main direction of my work was epistemological, ontological and methodological towards second-order cybernetics and relationships. Only in recent decades the political transformations proposed by Cybersyn have captured the imagination of many commentators. The confluence of social and cultural changes with information technology, data models, artificial intelligence, algorithms and several additional technological developments have challenged the excesses of capitalism, particularly after the banking crisis of 2008–2009. The purpose in this paper is discussing this evolution in the light of those early days in Chile. Springer London 2022-01-04 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC8726523/ /pubmed/35002095 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01348-0 Text en © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2022 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Original Article Espejo, Raul Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance |
title | Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance |
title_full | Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance |
title_fullStr | Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance |
title_full_unstemmed | Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance |
title_short | Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance |
title_sort | cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance |
topic | Original Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8726523/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35002095 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01348-0 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT espejoraul cybersynbigdatavarietyengineeringandgovernance |