In the last couple of years I've been reading the books of Stafford Beer, and he had some interesting ideas which were way ahead of his time. It's debatable ho

In the last couple of years I've been reading the books of Stafford Beer, and he had some interesting ideas which were way ahead of his time. It's debatable how well Cybersyn and Cyberfolk would have worked in the early 1970s, using a single IBM computer plus telex systems. Today we would call this type of system SCADA, but Beer's ideas extended beyond factory control into the overall economy and political process. At the time Cybersyn was portrayed in the British and some of the Chilean newspapers as a totalitarian "big brother" system, but that wasn't how it was designed to work. Beer saw the economy as a closed loop rather than a top down hierarchy, and he knew about and was hostile towards the Soviet GOSPLAN type economy. If you're interested in Cybersyn then there is a recent book by Eden Medina called "Cybernetic revolutionaries" which describes the system and its development.