AI & SOCIETY
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01350-6
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Why did cybernetics disappear from Latin America?
An Incomplete Timeline
David Maulén de los Reyes1
Received: 15 October 2020 / Accepted: 18 October 2021
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2022
Abstract
The Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang proposed the theory of "kicking away the ladder", in reference to how the world’s
great powers managed to establish themselves as such after a prolonged period of robust measures to protect their development. Once they achieved that, they entered the free global market, demanding that small countries eschew any protectionist
measures and immediately enter the ‘free trade’ in a highly unprotected manner. According to this approach, Cybernetics in
Latin America can be interpreted in different ways: it can be a confirmation of the disappearance of technological, social, and
industrial development defended by the already non-existent Latin American developmental states that had a utopian view
of technology as a tool for self-determination, but, on the other, it can also be a provocation for those in the region who still
believe in the possibilities of Cybernetics to develop and support its proposals. There is a fundamental difference between
using technology and producing it, while the ways of using it are also techniques or technologies in themselves. This paper
outlines the meaning of first-order cybernetics and then interprets what second-order cybernetics has represented in Latin
America, its Viable System Model, and how its components have evolved.
Keywords Latin American cybernetics · Technology and development · Science and developmentalism · Sustainable
development · Vernacularity and functionalism
1 Introduction, cybernetics in Latin America,
an incomplete timeline
cybernetics is not merely a scientific discipline, but rather a
transdisciplinary practice in which different areas of natural sciences, social sciences, and technology are integrated,
assimilated into the General Systems Theory since 1950 (von
Bertalanffy 1950). Usually associated with the use of technology, this is actually a working model that became known
after the Second World War, mainly through the publications
of Norbert Wiener and his collaborators. Cybernetics studies the theory of communication and information (Shannon
1948), as well as the mechanisms of regulation and management that tend towards autonomy and which are typical of living systems. At the same time, it investigates how
* David Maulén de los Reyes
dmaulen@utem.cl
1
Architecture School, Technological Metropolitan University
UTEM, Santiago, Chile
these biological mechanisms can be applied in technological
development.
For the same reason, cybernetics pays special attention to
the mechanisms and connections in the nervous systems of
living beings, but, at the same time, it is not limited to the
study and design of psychophysiological behaviors, unlike
other areas of design that are primarily centered on elements
of physics and mathematics. In contrast, cybernetics also
uses a large number of tools from disciplines that are dedicated to the study of human and environmental behavior,
such as psychology, economics, or anthropology. The first
great internationally recognized milestone, in the period
immediately after the post-war period, was scientist Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Wiener 1948).
The bases of what is known as first-order cybernetics were
outlined in this text.
However, one aspect that has remained understudied is
the significance of the arguments of Mexican physiologist
Arturo Rosenblueth in the first formulations of cybernetics,
not only because of his nationality, but also because of his
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commitment to scientific and technological development
in Latin America, on which Rosenblueth collaborated with
Wiener and other researchers (Guzik 2018).
In a region that has been continually wracked by political instability, coups, and economic growth rates considerably lower than the average expansions observed nowadays,
we can nevertheless state that there is an impressive list
of important names in science and technology who have
believed and invested strongly in a techno-scientific utopia
with its own characteristics. These include the Mexican
Arturo Rosenblueth, who rejected a permanent position
at the University of Illinois when he learned that it would
be necessary to renounce his Mexican nationality to do
so (Guzik 2009); the Spanish-Mexican Ramón ÁlvarezBuylla, who, thanks to Rosenblueth’s influence, prioritized
publishing papers in Spanish to support the development
of science in the region (Fernández Guardiola 1997); the
Argentines Manuel Sadosky, Oscar Varsavsky, and Amilcar
Herrera, among others, who, after the 1966 military coup
in that country, decided to remain in the region in small
working groups instead of choosing to flee to Europe or
the United States (Jacovkis 2014); the Brazilians Darcy
Ribeiro and Carlos Senna Figueiredo, who, after the Chilean experience of the Cybersyn methodology 1972–1973;
Synco1 system along with Varsavsky and with the support
of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces and
United Nations’s International Labour Organization, promoted second-order cybernetics in Peru 1973–1974 (Pereira
1992) (Varsavsky 1974), the research of the Brazilian Álvaro
Vieira Pinto on “themes proposed by cybernetics” upon his
return from exile in Chile in 1973 (Vieira Pinto, 2005), the
initiative to create the Institute of Cybernetics and Applied
Mathematics (ICIMAF) in Cuba in 1970 (González Abreut
2020), or the Chileans Joaquín Luco and Mario Luxoro, who
rejected careers as researchers in the United States to create
research centers in South America (Chuaqui 2016; Scully
2008), and Francisco Varela, who after being exiled in the
National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris
subsequent to the 1973 military coup in Chile, returned to
Universidad de Chile in the midst of the dictatorship (Varela
1994), among many others.
From this point, it is possible to map out a system of relationships between agents from the scientific, technological,
and design worlds that define the development of these practices going beyond mechanical assimilation.
In 2019, the researchers Marine Urbain and Hans Teerds
sketched out “An incomplete timeline” based on the concept
1
In 1972 Raúl Espejo in Chile renamed the Cybersyn project as
Synco for a better understanding of the Spanish language. It means
Information and Control System.
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of "Critical Regionalism" developed by the architectural
theorist Kenneth Frampton (Teerds 2019).
“Critical Regionalism” is a concept that challenges critics
of modern architecture who limit themselves to assessing its
development according to the formalist fidelity of “original”
models with “copies” built in different contexts.
In contrast, Frampton argues that it is necessary to
remember the origin of modernity as a social transformation project that requires critical analysis, to provide answers
that respond to the requirements of each particular context,
according to the social or natural environment for which it
is designed, and that this is a long way from being a type of
localist enlightenment, as it is sometimes classed.
This is the approach that we propose for this system of
relationships on Cybernetics in Latin America, an incomplete timeline whose main axis is the materializations that
have been possible in Latin America because of what was
known from a utopian or prospective such as second-order
cybernetics (Von Foerster 1974), in which those who are to
receive a design must also be part of its process of configuration, management, and implementation, these being their
cultural efforts for the region.
2 Retrospective analysis of systems of social
representation and sociology of symbolic
production
One of the characteristic tools of cybernetics is prospective
analysis (Francois 1977), or projection design of possible
futures. This type of research can be adapted from the cybernetic postulates to the systems analysis design proposed by
Horst Rittel (Rittel 1972).
It is important to note that the aforementioned Charles
Francois was a Belgian researcher who founded the Argentine Association of General Systems Theory and Cybernetics
in 1976, while Horst Rittel was a professor at the emblematic Ulm School of Design (HfG Ulm), where he introduced
a range of content regarding cybernetics to students who
would later have significant influences in various Latin
American countries.
This methodological approach departs from the history
of design and its interdisciplinary links as an area of cultural
studies that refers to institutionalizing peripheral phenomena
in a fetishistic manner. In contrast, in this case the proposal
is to adapt the sociology of symbolic production proposed
by Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1992) to projectively study the
background history of cybernetics in Latin America.
Based on these references, in this research we apply a
retrospective system of relationships (Maulén 2017), which
is subdivided into the following sections:
1. Systems of social representation
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2. Devices or interfaces
3. Epistemologies or space for the construction of a system
of meaning
4. Globalized scope of incidence or influence in which the
former three are considered.
Systems of social representation constitute the exceptional moments in which symbolic production is capable of
modifying the behavior of a social group. It is therefore a
change of the paradigm model.
For a retrospective view, we can refer to Catherine
David's approach to Documenta X, the quinquennial contemporary art exhibition held in 1997 in Kassel, Germany.
In this curatorial proposal, this researcher proposed a retrospective review that would allow us to understand the major
milestones that defined the end of the twentieth century
after the Second World War (David 1997). In the subsequent
Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor supplemented this by also
using the model of social representation systems, but from
a comparative perspective to analyze processes of Identity,
Subjectivity, and Representation that were simultaneously
stated in different ways in different geographical areas. This
proposal was made by Enwezor to understand the global
transformations of culture at the beginning of the twentyfirst century (Vicente 1999).
The concept of device here is used in accordance with the
definition of Jacques Aumont, as a conceptual and material
element that regulates a relationship of perception (Aumont
1992).
Using analysis, the four variables listed above are also
combined with four other factors:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Learning
Organization
Participation
Change
3 First‑order Cybernetics in and from Latin
America
Paradigm n.1 of Environmental Behavioral Design.
In 1943 Norbert Wiener published the essay: “Behavior,
Purpose and Teleology”, along with Arturo Rosenblueth and
Julián Bigelow (Wiener, Rosenblueth, and Bigelow 1943).
According to Wiener, in this article the fundamental
principles of the future development of cybernetics were
proposed, which were outlined as follows:
Proposal for the classification of behavior:
1st (2nd, 3rd) Order of Prediction, derived from predictive orders.
Differentiated from non-predictive orders (cannot be
extrapolated).
Predictive and Non-predictive Orders, derived from
feedback.
Differentiated from no feedback (non-teleological).
Feedback and Non-feedback, derived from Purposeful.
Differentiated from non-purposeful (random).
Purposeful and Non-purposeful, derived from active, differentiated from non-active (passive).
Active and Non-active, derived from behavior (Wiener,
Rosenblueth, and Bigelow 1943).
Who was Wiener’s co-author Arturo Rosenblueth? At
that time Rosenblueth was a Doctor of Medicine from the
Université de Paris, having graduated in 1927 and working
as a professor of Physiology between 1928 and 1930 at the
National School of Medicine in Mexico. With a scholarship
from the Guggenheim Foundation, he became a Fellow at
Harvard University in 1930. It was there that he developed
his specialization in research on synaptic transmission in the
Department of Physiology with professor Walter Cannon
(Guzik 2009).
The collaboration with Wiener on the 1943 essay was the
result of his attempt to build “a model of machine behavior similar to that of animals,” based on the perspective of
intentionality.
The notion of feedback, on which Rosenblueth began
working with his teacher Walter B. Cannon in the 1930s
when researching the problem of homeostasis, allows multiple problems to be understood, such as that regarding the
integration of movements or the relationship of an organism
with the environment that surrounds it (Guzik 2009).
Prior to the publication of the aforementioned essay, in
1942, Rosenblueth made a presentation at the Josiah Macy
Jr. Foundation in which he discussed feedback and circular
causality.
That presentation was witnessed by neuropsychiatrist
Warren McCulloch and psychologist Lawrence Kubie,
researchers in the design of engineering artifacts that
respond to a model of human behavior; and anthropologist
Margaret Mead, psychologist Gregory Bateson, and sociologist Lawrence K. Frank, researchers of relationships between
human beings and the environment. It was here that the formation of the future Cybernetics Group was somehow gestating (Guzik 2009).
On his return in 1947, Rosenblueth was appointed Director of the Laboratory of Physiology of the National Institute of Cardiology in Mexico. Supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation and Dr. Ignacio Chávez, Rosenblueth spent six
weeks working in his lab at the National Institute of Cardiology with Walter B. Cannon. In addition, financed by the
Rockefeller Foundation, Norbert Wiener visited the National
Institute of Cardiology. It was during this period that he
wrote his best-known work: Cybernetics: Or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Guzik,
2009).
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Shortly beforehand, the Mexican Enrique Freymann, editor at Hermann et Cie., had held a meeting with Norbert
Wiener in Paris, where he proposed that he write a book
about his collective research on the control and responses
of mechanical mechanisms and biological systems (Johnson
2015).
Finally, the book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was published
in Paris by Hermann and at the same time in Cambridge,
Massachusetts in conjunction with Technology Press, and
in New York by Wiley. As a direct effect of this, the Cercle
d'études cybernétiques, or Circle of Studies on Cybernetics,
was formed in France (Le Roux 2009).
In the 1940s, Spaniard Raúl Álvarez-Buylla joined
Rosenblueth’s team in Mexico. He graduated with honors
in 1943 as a physician from the universities of Rostov and
Ashkhabad, and received a Ph.D. in physiology under the
tutelage of Professor Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin at the Moscow
Academy of Medical Sciences.
In 1946, he devoted himself to studying the theory of
reflexes to regulatory processes, not only with the unidirectional information in the afferent nerves, but through what
he called Sanction Information, which is transmitted by the
nervous system when analyzing variations in responses,
from the receptors in this case, which can be summarized
as control and regulation mechanisms.
In 1947, he finally joined the National School of Biological Sciences at the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN),
developing theories on the physiology of receptors. Later he
became professor and co-founder of the Department of Physiology at the IPN Center for Research and Advanced Studies
(Cinvestav). He also collaborated with Arturo Rosenblueth
in the Department of Physiology of the National Institute of
Cardiology (Fernández Guardiola 1997).
4 What did or does second-order cybernetics
represent in Latin America?
Paradigm n.2 of heterarchical2 design of behavior in the
environment.
In relation to my first Chilean report, the remark came:
‘The government should be conceived as a viable system (System Five being the President of the Republic)’. I drew the square on the piece of paper labelled
Five. He threw himself back in his chair: ‘at last’, he
[Salvador Allende] said, ‘el pueblo’ (the people) (Beer
1981).
2
Greek concept used by Stafford Beer that means: Decentralized
Collaborative Independence DCI or alternative organization models
to a centralized and vertical hierarchy.
13
In 1967, the anthropologist Margaret Mead presented
the conference: “The Cybernetics of Cybernetics", at the
American Society of Cybernetics (Mead 1968), thus initiating studies of so-called second-order cybernetics.
Later, in 1971, the British cyberneticist representing this
new trend, Stafford Beer, was hired by the Production Development Corporation (Corfo), which belongs to the Chilean
government (Beer 1981).
Beer’s consulting firm Sigma had previously provided
services in IT management for the Port of Valparaíso. One
of those who worked on the implementation was Fernando
Flores, a young engineer from Universidad Católica, who,
thanks to this experience, read Beer’s first books. After Salvador Allende became President, Flores took over management of Corfo, and from there he urged the President to
create a new management model in line with those ideas
(Medina 2011).
And so it was that It was that the socialist government of
President Salvador Allende entrusted Stafford Beer with a
second-order cybernetics project with which the state could
be managed using a decentralized computer system and
transmission of information in real-time (online). That project was called CyberSyn, or Cybernetic Synergy (Medina
2011).
In spite of the endemic problems of South America at the
time, Chilean science and technology had already undergone
decades of development that had somehow anticipated this
milestone.
In 1939, Joaquín Luco had worked with Arturo Rosenblueth and Walter Cannon at Harvard University before
returning to Chile, where he led the creation of the Department of Neurophysiology at the Pontificia Universidad
Católica PUC in 1950 (Chuaqui 2016). In addition, after
Mario Luxoro obtained his doctorate in biophysics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957, he returned
to Chile and in 1965 managed to create the Cellular Physiology Laboratory at the Montemar campus of Universidad
de Chile in Valparaíso (Scully 2008). Finally, following
this summarized itinerary, it should also be underlined that,
Humberto Maturana, during his 1969 residency at the Biological Computer Laboratory of the University of Illinois
and under the supervision of Heinz von Foerster, delivered
the report Biology of Cognition (Maturana 1980).
At the same time, in the late 1950s, the servo-mechanisms
unit of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at
Universidad de Chile was investigating the use of analogue
computers. Also in that faculty, in 1958 Professor Carlos
Martinoya proposed the creation of a Computing Center,
which eventually happened in 1961 under the leadership
of Santiago Friedmann. In 1965, after the dean, Enrique
D’Etigny, proposed a five-year curriculum for the computer
studies course, the mathematical engineering degree course
was created (Alvarez 2012).
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Despite the various political upheavals, up until this
point the trajectory was representative of the period that
Latin America was undergoing. Similar situations were
also underway in Argentina, especially in the close circle of
the mathematician Manuel Sadosky. One of his colleagues,
Hernán Rodríguez-Campoamor, even published the book
Cybernética y Sicología in 1958,3 for which Sadosky wrote
the prologue, reflecting on the artificial intelligence about
which he had been writing since at least 1950 (Jacovkis
2014).
The Argentine situation was anything but stable, but
Sadosky and his close circle of scientists organized themselves to continue their work despite being excluded from
the institutions towards the end of the government of President Juan Domingo Perón, and more traumatically so under
the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía in the 1960s and
later with Jorge Rafael Videla in the 1970s. However, their
development was exceptional, like that achieved at the Public University in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition
to that, this group also had a positive impact on the networks
of exchange with other countries such as Peru, Chile, Brazil,
and Venezuela. Meanwhile, Sadosky insisted until the end
on achieving proprietary technological development, both in
Argentina (Días 2018) and in Uruguay at the beginning of
the 1970s and, after the fall of the Argentine military dictatorship, he had a predominant role in the reconstruction of
the scientific institutions (Jacovkis 2014).
Another exceptional case that anticipated one of the
objectives of CyberSyn was the project for control and
visualization of the economy by the government of Guatemala, headed by President Jacobo Arbenz, using a Monetary
National Income Analogue Computer (MONIAC) starting
in 1951 (Burbano 2020).
Arbenz was a member of the group of military officers
that overthrew dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. The Military
Junta that took power convened a Constituent Assembly to
draft a new constitution, before calling a plebiscite and then
elections, resulting in Arbenz finally being elected President in 1950. From this position, he implemented strong
social policies for the benefit of Guatemala’s economic and
political independence, with one of the highlights being the
Agrarian Reform. After the declassification of the United
State’s Central Intelligence Agency files, it became clear
that the CIA was involved in the covert operation to back a
military coup that overthrew Arbenz and led to his exile in
1954 (García Ferreira, July–December 2006).
3
In parallel to Manuel Sadosky's research group in Argentina, in
1955 Arturo Rosenblueth published: Psychology and Cybernetics,
Mexico, UNAM (Seminar on Scientific and Philosophical Problems,
4).
Continuing the Chilean case, in 1968, CORFO, which
was formed in 1939, created the National Computer Services
Company EMCO, under the direction of Efraín Friedmann,
who was director of the Mathematics Department of the
Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Universidad de Chile. EMCO changed its name to ECOM in 1971
and, together with its newly created INTEC Technological
Institute, provided direct support for the CyberSyn project
(Alvarez 2012).
In Chile, the CyberSyn or Synco project was carried out
between 1971 and 1973, based on Stafford Beer’s Viable
System Model (VSM). Using the central nervous system of
the human body as a reference.
The Cybersyn or Synco project basically consisted of two
things:
1. Based on the Heterarchy (Decentralized Collaborative
Independence) of second-order cybernetics, it consisted
of a decentralized network of management of the production, administration, and decisions of state-owned
companies.
2. Using the software Cyberstride (Fig. 1) through a telex
system, it was a network for the transmission of information in "real time", also known as online.
The Viable System Model (VSM) can be resumed in three
elements:
1. The natural and social environment
2. The decision-making space, the person or persons
3. The technology mediating the relationship between the
environment and the decision
With these three elements, the fourth emerges; The
Action (Anonymous September 6, 1973).
In addition, in 1968, on the initiative of the International
Labor Organisation (ILO), Gui Bonsiepe, the designer and
former member of the Ulm School of Design (HfG Ulm),
arrived in Chile to support Corfo with its Import Substitution Program (ISI) (Portal 2016).
In 1971, the Corfo Institute for Technological Research
(INTEC) was created by Bonsiepe.
Using the critique of political economy in the space of the
symbolic, in 1972 Bonsiepe posed the challenge of calculating the “use value” of the field of aesthetics, the “promise of
use value”. He prepared a strategic formulation of the concept of interaction design: the Interface, which he published
in the newsletter Intec (Bonsiepe 1972).
In his 1972 approach to the concept of interface/interaction design, Bonsiepe synthesized several of the debates
conducted at HfG Ulm by professors that introduced ideas
on first-order cybernetics, like Max Bense and Horst Rittel, in the field of political economy criticism. For example,
13
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Fig. 1 Recursive structure
of the organization model
according to Raúl Espejo and
Jorge Barrientos publication in
INTEC Corfo magazine no. 4,
June 1973; own source
Bonsiepe combined the semiotics applied to information
theory (Shannon 1948) and the analysis of first- and secondgeneration systems (Rittel 1972).
At the same time, Bonsiepe was a key link in the development of cybernetics in South America by leading the team
that developed the analogue and digital interfaces for the
emblematic Cybersyn project. In this respect, Bonsiepe also
interpreted the use of Ross Ashby’s Requisite Variety concept (Ashby 1958) in the way in which it was applied by
Stafford Beer in his Viable System Model to achieve secondorder cybernetics.
After the military coup in Chile in September 1973, the
entire CyberSyn project and the developmental state economic model that supported it was dismantled. However,
the General Systems Theory and Viable System Model would
follow other trajectories in Latin America.
In 1975, the Chilean dictatorship decided to implement
a project that was hitherto unprecedented and extreme, following the neoliberal or “monetarist” guidelines of the University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman. The team in
charge of this was a select group of economists from Chile’s
Pontificia Universidad Católica, who had conducted postgraduate studies in Chicago since the mid-1950s.
One of the fundamental guidelines of this project was
that the state would no longer promote protected industrial
development. The Corfo Technological Institute disappeared shortly after the military coup and the components
13
for household appliances sold in the country gradually
stopped being supplied by domestic industry. National
computing company ECOM did not disappear immediately
after the 1973 military coup, but it was sidelined until its
facilities suffered irreparable damage in a 1983 storm.
From the outset, the new program proposed that the
state should get rid of its companies and hand them over to
the private sector. The new political constitution imposed
by Augusto Pinochet in 1980 decreed that Corfo would not
create any more companies.
The Chilean model called itself neoliberal, but we can
establish that there were significant differences, for example with South Korea, where policies were implemented to
protect the development and trade of the national technology industry (Kim 2007) and free trade education as the
principal option was not provided.
Paradoxically, that Chilean constitution established an
election process that removed Pinochet from the position
of the Presidency of the Republic in 1989, but not the
position of Commander-in-Chief of the Army and future
Senator for Life.
At that time, the Secretary General of the State Administration Commission of the coalition of parties that won
the election, Enrique Correa, contacted the Uruguayan
government regarding the URUCIB project, a cybernetic
state administration project headed by engineer Victor
Ganón, with direct input from Stafford Beer, which had
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been used in administrative restructuring since the return
of democracy in that country.
The change of government in Chile did not mean there
was any change in the economic or constitutional models,
with those implemented by the dictatorship still being used.
In Uruguay, the military did not manage to change the constitution during the dictatorship and the model continued to
be a combination of the state and free market. In this respect,
the success of URUCIB under these conditions would foreshadow the long-term program that Uruguay would draw
up years later to become a regional leader in software production, while also becoming the first country to achieve
100% implementation of the One Laptop Per Child program
devised by Nicholas Negroponte at the MIT Media Lab. In
the context of 1989, Victor Ganón sent all of the information requested regarding URUCIB to the Chilean delegates
Osvaldo García de la Cerda and Víctor Díaz Guzmán, but
did not receive a response from them (Ganón 2019).4
4.1 The ill‑fated experiences of Russell Ackoff
and Stafford Beer in Mexico
In 1963, architect and doctor of philosophy of science Russell Ackoff began a long period of collaboration, visits, and
exchanges with Mexican researchers. He was initially a
promoter of the systems approach and research of operations applied to the field of administrative sciences (VergaraAnderson 1996).
In 1976, on the invitation of Universidad Autónoma de
México (UNAM), Ackoff spent a year in the country as a
resident researcher. In 1979, the Mexican publishing house
Limusa translated and published his book Redesigning the
Future (Ackoff 1979).
Ackoff's experience included serving as President of the
Operations Research Society of America and President of
the International Society for International Systems Research.
In 1976, with the publishing company Wiley, he published the first version of the book Redesigning the future.
In this text he established the four “pure attitudes' ' that can
be assumed in any situation: 1st Inactivism, 2nd Reactivism,
3th Preactivism and 4th Interactivism.
The author contrasts organizations with cybernetic mechanisms and also with organisms, defining them as purposeful
systems, formed by subsystems with their own purposes and
constituting supra systems that also have their own purposes.
He identified three types of generic problems in the
administration and control of organizations, involving the
4
Symptomatically today, in the year 2021, institutions such as Corfo,
or Editorial Universitaria do not allow the reproduction of their publications dedicated to cybernetics in Chile in 1972 or 1973.
need to increase the effectiveness with which they serve:
Self-control, Humanization, and Environmentalization.
During his research residency at UNAM (1975–1976) he
wrote: National Development Planning Revisited (VergaraAnderson 1996).
In spite of the fact that Ackoff’s experience was not what
he had hoped, it did reveal a certain susceptibility towards
systemic approaches in government.
Also in 1979, the Mexican publisher Fondo de Cultura
Económico FCE translated and published the Stafford Beer
book Designing Freedom (Beer 1979).
In 1983 Beer was invited by the Mexican government,
through the Planning and Budget Secretariat (SPP), to take
part in the project Autonomex, which had the objective of
applying the VSM to create a control and monitoring system
for the Mexican economy.
That same year, FCE also translated and published Stafford Beer's book: Decision and Control: The Meaning of
Operational Research and Management Cybernetics (Beer
1983).
The Viable System suggested by Beer is one that has the
ability to survive, subsist, or self-adapt within a changing
environment.
Based on Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (Ashby
1958), the regulating device of a system that self-adapts to a
complex variable environment must be capable of internally
generating at least a variety of states as large as the set of
situations that such an environment can present.
The VSM considers an indefinite number of hierarchical
models, within each one of which it recursively manifests
itself in its entirety.
The five types of interacting systems are:
1. Those corresponding to each operating unit
2. The operational administration of the different operating
units
3. The information system that links up and down the different operating units with the system responsible for
their operational management and buffers the operations
that the operation tends to generate.
4. The person responsible for monitoring the environment
(relative to the viable system in question) and identifying the mechanisms of adaptation to it that have to be
activated to continue viable operation.
5. The person responsible for the supervision and standardization of the functions carried out by the previous
subsystems, particularly the latter two.
Due to the recursive nature of the model, every viable
system is, in turn, an operating unit of another viable
system (Vergara-Anderson 1996).
Beer’s experience in Mexico was not particularly positive,
but there would soon be a boost for the implementation of
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the Viable System Model in Latin America, which turned
out to be quite successful as was the example in Uruguay.
4.2 URUCIB, cybernetic Uruguay
The great vindication of the Viable System Model in South
America.
In fact, all the work began according to my studies on
the human body and the way it works. System Five is
the cerebral cortex; System Four, the midbrain; System
Three is the cerebellum; System Two is the sympathetic system; and System One would be the organs.
Stafford Beer to Uruguayan lawmaker César Blumm,
June 15, 1987, Committee on Science, Technology and
Informatics of the House of Representatives (Ganón
2019).
In 1968, Argentine mathematician Manuel Sadosky, who
was responsible for implementing the computer system at
Universidad de la República in Uruguay, introduced the Uruguayan engineer Victor Ganón to Stafford Beer's ideas on
second-order cybernetics.
In 1985, at the end of the Uruguayan dictatorship, in the
context of the return of democracy, Ganón delivered a proposal to President Julio María Sanguinetti: “Analysis, design,
and implementation of a control system based on data processing through computing.” Then, in 1986 and thanks to the
efforts of Ganón, Stafford Beer traveled to Uruguay for the
first time to meet the President and draw up the guidelines
for the Uruguay Cybernetic project, URUCIB (Ganón 2019).
Uruguay Cybernetic was a pioneering executive information system, designed and implemented for the Presidency
of Uruguay.
The project was headed by Ganón until the end of the
1990s and, initially, it was directly supervised by Stafford
Beer between 1986 and 1988.
The system created a data network and incorporated
viable system models from second-order cybernetics and
statistical techniques to detect incipient instabilities in the
country's situation.
It had an intuitive graphic human interface, based on the
extension of the senses and the hand, which allowed decision-making based on all the information presented daily
in the Administrative Center of the Office of the President.
After years of dictatorship, the executive branch of government required daily information on key variables, almost
in real time, to assess the country's situation, providing early
detection of possible problems and making sound and wellinformed decisions.
In 1988, on the morning of Monday, October 3, the
URUCIB project team went to the Presidency on the seventh
floor of the Libertad building in Montevideo to make the
necessary connections and officially inaugurate the system.
13
On May 10, 1989, the Presidency of Uruguay received
a call from the Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires
in Argentina, Dr. Antonio Cafiero, who was interested in
visiting Montevideo to find out more about the URUCIB
Operations Room so it could be replicated in the neighboring country.
Between July and August of 1990, governments and
agencies from Bolivia, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and
Paraguay all expressed interest in Uruguay’s URUCIB system. A delegation from the Presidency of Nicaragua visited the following year, agreeing to exchange information
(Ganón 2019).
In parallel with this process, in 1995 the professor and
researcher Raúl Espejo, a former member of the original
Cybersyn project, along with professor Raúl Bula, implemented the project “Institutional Change and Strengthening of the Comptroller General of the Republic (CGR)”
in Colombia (Espejo, Auditing as the Dissolution of Corruption 2001).
In 2016, in that same country, Raúl Espejo and Alfonso
Reyes published the book Organizational Systems. Managing Complexity With the Viable System Model (Espejo
and Reyes 2016).
Professor Raúl Espejo currently serves as president
of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics
(WOSC), which was founded in 1969 with the objective of
facilitating communication between people and organizations related to systems thinking and cybernetics (Espejo
2021).
In 2015, the Chilean biologist Leonardo Lavanderos
made criticisms and suggested improvement of the Viable
System Model for the effective realization of second-order
cybernetics. This view was that the VSM, as it was defined,
understands the environment as something external to the
system. Considering this he proposed to apply the concept
of relationship as an effective heterarchy, which would take
the place of the previous concept of interaction (Lavanderos
2015).
5 Fundación Bariloche (Bariloche
foundation BF)’s Latin American world
model (MML)
An alternative global paradigm n.2 of heterarchical design
of behavior into the environment.
As a result of the exodus of Argentine scientists after the
1966 military coup, Amilcar Herrera had settled in Chile.
In 1972, with the publishing house of Universidad de
Chile, he published the book Latin America. Science and
Technology in the Development of Society.
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Fig. 2 Computing center of
Fundación Bariloche in the
early 1970s and Global MML
Graphics (Latin America is represented in the lower left corner
of the 1972 computerized
graph). Photographs courtesy of
professor Hugo Scolnik
That book included a contribution by Manuel Sadosky
under the title: “Computation in the modern world. Realities
and perspectives in Latin America”. This article began with
the following statement:
For 20 years, with the appearance of Norbert Wiener's book on Cybernetics, a new specter has haunted
the world: automatism and the possibilities that
sometimes appear limitless of increasing the dominion over nature and freeing man from non-creative
work (Sadosky 1972).
That same year Amilcar Herrera was expelled from Universidad de Chile and returned to Argentina to work at the
then avant-garde Fundación Bariloche.
In this new context, he and Hugo Scolnik led a team
that created a prospective model of sustainable development that was an alternative to the World III Model developed at MIT on behalf of the Club of Rome. To achieve
this, the computing center of Bariloche Foundation was
essential (Fig. 2).
In 1974 the “Latin American World Model” developed
at Fundación Bariloche was presented at the International
Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA) in Austria
(Grondona 2020).
The scope of this proposal was illustrated when William
D. Nordhaus, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in
2018, wrote about Fundación Bariloche’s MML project in
1975 (Nordhaus 1975).
In 1971, a group of specialists from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) presented the report The
Limits of Growth in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Unlike the development model promoted at the time
by the United Nations, growth is mainly justified by the
annual profitability produced and neglects other complex
factors such as education, health, and the social and natural environments.
13
AI & SOCIETY
At the instigation of the Club of Rome, using computerized predictive models, this report predicted that if the
same rates of demographic and economic growth continued, the Earth would reach its physical limits, unleashing
an ecological disaster.
5.1 Criticism and proposals from Fundación
Bariloche; the Latin American World Model
The first objection to the diagnosis of the Club of Rome
was to its prediction of a “technological apocalypse” without considering the conditions of profound inequality still
existing at the international level and between various social
sectors that made the continued existence of this order
impossible.
Fundación Bariloche was insistent in underlining that the
limits to development, rather than being physical, were the
result of social and political factors that it was a priority to
change.
Another point emphasized by Fundación Bariloche was
the unequal responsibility of developed and underdeveloped
countries regarding the phenomena associated with global
pollution and the depletion of resources, due to the massive
consumption of wealthy nations and the privileged minorities in poor countries.
According to Fundación Bariloche, proposals such as that
of the Club of Rome did not recognize the unequal weight of
the international structure, thus “freezing” the current situation in favor of rich countries, since the sacrifices required
of underdeveloped countries included “the impossible price
of self-induced genocide.”
The foundation’s MML was created with a focus on satisfying basic human needs.
It would show that adopting criteria for social and international organization could satisfy these requirements globally by the early twenty-first century.
It was a productive model separated into five areas:
1. Food—2. Education—3. Housing—4. Capital Goods—
5. Other services and consumer goods.
The MML also divided the world into four blocks:
1. Developed countries—2. Asia—3. Africa—4. Latin
America
Instead of working based on demographic projections, it
was understood that the population functioned as an endogenous variable linked to socioeconomic determinants. The
demographic sub-model allowed investigation of the hypothesis that the only adequate model of intervention for these
dimensions was to improve living conditions (Grondona
2020).
Despite the international interest that the MML aroused
after its presentation in 1974 at the IIASA in Austria, which
resulted in it being translated and disseminated in languages
13
such as German (Herrera and Scolnik 1977), French (Herrera 1977), and English (Herrera and Scolnik 1976), in 1976,
the authorities of the Argentine military dictatorship decided
to restrict the activities of Fundación Bariloche to a minimum, so it was not possible to continue this project.
In light of this, it is significant that, in 2017, the German
publisher Fischer decided to reissue the proposal.
6 Latin American evolution
of the components of second-order
cybernetics
In 1972, in Chile, based on the logic of autonomous behavior
and not solely considering the reactions to viruses and other
pathogens that are characteristic of the immune system, biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana published
their thesis on Autopoiesis in the book On machines and
living beings (Maturana and Varela 1972).
Stafford Beer wrote a prologue for the first edition of the
book. From the beginning, he considered that the concept of
Autopoiesis could be extrapolated to society. In 1994, Francisco Varela summed up Autopoiesis in five points (added
to a zero point indicated by the same author):
0. The problem of the autonomy of the living being is central and should be considered in its minimal form, in the
characterization of the living unit.
1. The characterization of the minimal living unit cannot
be done solely on the basis of material components.
The description of the organization of the living being
as a configuration or pattern is equally essential.
2. The organization of the living is, essentially, a mechanism for the constitution of its identity as a material
entity.
3. The process of constituting identity is circular: a network
of metabolic productions that, among other things, produce a membrane that makes the very existence of the
network possible. This fundamental circularity is therefore a unique self-production of living unity at the cellular level. The term autopoiesis designates this minimal
organization of the living being.
4. Every interaction of autopoietic identity occurs not only
in terms of its physicochemical structure, but also as an
organized unit, that is, in reference to itself-produced
identity. A point of reference appears explicitly in the
interactions and, therefore, the emergence of a new level
of phenomena: the constitution of meanings. Autopoietic systems inaugurate the interpretive phenomenon in
nature.
5. Autopoietic identity makes evolution possible through
reproductive series with structural variation with con-
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servation of identity. The identity constitution of an individual precedes the process of evolution empirically and
logically (Varela 1994).
In 1974, with the engineer Ricardo Uribe, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana developed a digital visualization of the principle of Autopoiesis, the Protobio or First Life
(Varela, Maturana and Uribe 1974).
The Autopoiesis proposal had unexpected implications
in various fields, going beyond what its authors expected,
one of the most notable cases being its application by the
sociologist Niklas Luhmann.
At the same time as this approach was originally published, the book by the French engineer and researcher Paul
Idatte, Fundamental Notions of Cybernetics (Idatte 1972a,
b), or The Keys of Cybernetics (Idatte 1972a, b), was translated and published in Chile and Brazil.
In 1976, Chilean architect Jaime Garretón published his
book A cybernetic theory of the city and its system with
the Argentine publisher Nueva Visión, in which he adapted
Claude Shannon’s Theory of Information and Communication (Shannon 1948) to systemic-urban planning, through
what he called “the non-city” (Garretón 1975). In a similar
direction, in 1977 the Mexican Álvaro Sánchez published:
Architectural and Urban Systems (Sánchez 1977).
In 1980, Dr. Ricardo Rodríguez-Ulloa created the Andean
Systems Institute (IAS) in Peruvian capital Lima (Francois
2004) and, in 1990, with the support of Peru’s National
Council for Science and Technology (Concytec), he created
the journal Sistémica.
In 1948 John von Neumann defined Cellular Automata
as a mathematical and computational (analogue or digital)
model for a dynamic system that evolves in discrete steps,
suitable for modeling natural systems that can be described
as a massive collection of simple objects that interact locally
with one other (Von Neumann 1966).
In 1979, Francisco Varela published Principles of Biological Autonomy, which started with his research on the
limits of Cellular Automata (Varela 1979). In 1992, along
with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, he published The
Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
(Varela et al. 1992).
In 1988, towards the end of the Chilean military dictatorship and in the last years of the Cold War, the Chilean
Miguel Giacaman developed an antivirus program based on
the immunological system, called Virus Detection (Vit-Det),
changing the focus to halt the attack of the Jerusalem virus,
also known as Friday 13th (Security Information Center
n.d.).
Unlike other antivirus software, Vir-Det reproduced the
“infected” file and eliminated the “infection” in the copy,
thus saving the original information. It also adapted to
different computer viruses. In 1994, IBM bought Vir-Det
and distributed it under the name Oyster and Oyster 2.0.
Although the economic and political context was completely different to that of his predecessors, Giacaman
seemed to reinterpret the epistemological principles of his
background, but facing the challenges of his time, generating a paradigm shift, but not in an illustrative or theoretical
manner, but instead in the architecture of the actual device.
Around the same time, Giacaman developed Film Master,
a Chilean version of the information storage and classification code known as the barcode, mass-distributing it domestically at a far lower cost than imported versions (Giacaman
1994).
However, as there was no local organic structure for
medium-term projection, the global paradigm shift proposed and effectively implemented by Giacaman in the way
he conceived bio-digital architecture did not have any perspectives of institutional inclusion, becoming the exception
that proves the rule.
6.1 A techno‑collaborative prospective
in and from Latin America
In 1971, the Italian-Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro presented his manifesto Arteônica (electronic art), which was
the result of research carried out since 1968 in the computer
laboratory of Universidade de São Paulo. As a representative of the avant-garde, Cordeiro outlined the need to use the
tools provided by science and technology, but with studies of
the psycho-physiological reactions to the communicational
phenomena used by the new essential technologies being
essential for future projects. These also posed challenges that
were related to the specific context in which these strategies
were implemented (Cordeiro 1972).
Dulmini Perera (Perera 2020) considered that cybernetics as a study of information is something that is not limited
solely to machines and digital logics. Instead, it considers
processes of cybernetization as being highly important as a
generalized ecology concerned with life and the production,
exchange, and consumption of meaning. Cybernetization can
therefore lay the foundations for an ecological explanation
that examines how signals are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within ecological systems.
This tentative third-order cybernetics extends beyond the
original scope of living organisms and their environments
to ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media, etc. In this
regard, cybernetization is radically environmental, postulating the predominance of relationships over fixed terms,
binary oppositions, and linear logics, so it would therefore
be time for studies of architectural and urban design, for
example, to reconsider their transformative potential.
Bearing this in mind, in a context totally different from
the developmental state, we see persistent traces of the
13
AI & SOCIETY
Fig. 3 2014 Broadband network
project, Union of Southern
Nations (UNASUR), Own
source
approaches that previously produced such respect for
Cybernetics in Latin America, such as the 2014 attempt
to create a broadband network (Fig. 3) to make the Union
of Southern Nations (UNASUR) independent from the
services provided from the United States (Clarck Estes
2014), among various others, thus leaving the door open to
a regional vision of third-order cybernetics in the future.
URUCIB was acknowledged as a factor that could be
key in consolidating the creation of the Southern Common
Market (MERCOSUR) in 1990, due firstly to its use by
the Uruguayan Presidency and the interest that it aroused
in the Government of Buenos Aires Province at that time,
interest that later spread to the Nicaraguan government.
However, URUCIB was supported by the first government
of Julio María Sanguinetti and received funding from the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). When
the government changed, the international funding for the
first few years was terminated and the Uruguayan government decided not to invest in it, unlike the Argentine and
Nicaraguan governments.
From another angle, the network proposed by UNASUR
was part of an effort by its members to enhance the role
of the state once again. This disappeared with the subsequent changes of government and UNASUR lost some of
its strength.
13
Since November 17, 2020, the engineer Francisco
Sagasti has acted as interim President of Peru, but the
various problems that he has had to contend with have cast
doubt on whether he could propose a systemic perspective
to his government that corresponds to his experience in
this area in the 1970s, being very close to Darcy Ribeiro,
Oscar Varsavsky, and Carlos Senna, or even considering
his direct links to Stafford Beer himself in the past.
In the same vein, after the October 2020 elections, the
Bolivian government requested a proposal for assessment
entitled Ecological and Cybernetic Viability of Ayllu, from
the Chileans Alejandro Malpartida and Leonardo Lavanderos, which could be interpreted as a new light on the horizon for cybernetics to be seen as an option in the region once
again, assuming the specific challenges and advantages of
the context.
7 Why did cybernetics disappeared
from Latin America?
Cybernetics did not really disappear from Latin America,
but in practice, this statement poses a double provocation.
On the one hand, the great and little known development
of cybernetics in Latin America, in its most extreme cases,
was possible within the structure of developmental organic
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states. With the determined commitment to integrate their
debates within the structure of the scientific and technological development of the country. Only from a systemic
conception of the different components of government is it
possible to go so far in the execution of these ideas based
on collective and social benefit, even more so from secondorder cybernetics. It was also in this sense that despite the
constant regional instabilities from the 20s to the 70s; however, it was thanks to the initiatives of Latin American scientists and technicians that some of the most relevant chapters
of global cybernetics were possible. This means their participation in the first epistemological formulations, but also in
the elaboration of interfaces and devices that will transform
the context on a scale of paradigm changes in systems of
social representation and symbolic production.
Second and last, the statement that cybernetics disappeared from Latin America is a provocation for those who
continued to try to develop this science after the models of
the developmental state, or from its traces. And that they can
respond with their practical testimony as it was possible to
persist in spite of everything. But more importantly, it is a
provocation to demonstrate the need and real possibilities
of reinterpreting the variables of the current context, to find
a way to face the present challenges from the reformulation
of these inheritances. It will still be an incomplete timeline
that will continue to be written.
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