Super Cybernetic Brothers - Jacque Fresco and Stafford Beer

Similarities and Differences

Both apply their concept directly to production.
Both focus on the creation of a scientific method of government.
Both used the science with human and environmental concern.
Both were polymath that had contact with the Cybernetics Trend, that is the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine( not the trivial control, and yes, both talked to Wiener)
They differ in their opinions about Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence.
Both had inspired in the human body.
Both support the concept of Emergence.
Both had scientific social circles and made a strong use of Descriptive Languages.
Although both talk about communication between computers, production and people, the participation of people is different in the 2 cybernetics, Fresco is more about a government that doesn't depend on the right man, for Beer the interaction between people receive more focus.
Fresco would imagine an invention and the factory that produces that invention, Beer would worry about that the activity in the factory is perfectly organized.
When Beer has the opportunity of apply his work in a national level, he accepts. Fresco required globality in order to apply his ideas. Needless to say today is extremely hard keep a different social context to a city or national level.
The summit experience of Fresco was to visit a island of natives sharing things, for Beer, was a conversation with a president.
The Fresco style is conveyed predominantly through industrial design and material sciences, for Beer is through diagrams, schemas, operation research and numbers.
The Fresco Economy is more oriented to local production and delivery, the Beer economy is oriented to the effective organization.
An average conspiracy Theorist would say that both rummaged outside of the matrix :0
Fresco proposes the Resource Based Economy, Beer proposes the Viable System Model.

The Resource Based Economy

"It is a holistic social and economic system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude. All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few. The premise upon which this system is based is that the Earth is abundant with plentiful resources; our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter productive to our survival."

Extended definition
Operational definition

The 3 Stages of The Venus Project

1 Building of the Research Center

Which it is already build, located in Venus, Florida, United States, it shows how it would be to live in the residential belt of the circular cities he envisions and it is also, the place where are given tours to visitors that want to know more about The Venus Project.

2 Documentaries and a full-length feature film

So far only the official documentaries Paradise or oblivion and The Choice is Ours. Also other excellent are TROM, Future my Love, Future by Design , Zeitgeist: Addendum and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward .

3 Building of a experimental city

Not yet, and it seems to be the acid test for The Venus Project because it represents the creation of an environment free of the claws of the monetary system, and at the same time, it is a massive coordinated effort, like the Manhattan Project, but under the guidelines of The Venus Project . It is tempting to think that make a virtual version is easier, but, the matter it is not so easy due to the great number of variables involved. Maybe the 2 versions at the same time to see the richness of social sequences of his cities :D.... Is there something more demonstrative than the construction of the first city?.

Jacque fresco Production

It consist of a great numbers of pictures and miniatures of many thing like, dome shaped homes, mass-produced extruded dwellings, multi-access industrial robots, megamachines like laser excavators, tunnel assemblers, massive lifting crane, ocean platform for mariculture, his famous miniatures of circular cities in land and sea, floating megastructures, maglev trains, bridges, underground and sea tunnels, earthquake-proof towers, a cibernated complex, undersea observatories, international shipping systems, crosswind-proof airports, floating sea domes, geothermal energy plants, mile-high skyscrapers, desalinization plants, vertical take-off and landing units that use a ring-vortex air columns, aerodynamic car and marine vehicles, ion propulsion planes, megaprojects like Harnessing the Gulf Stream, a Bering Strait Dam, Continental Networks of waterways, canals and irrigations system to minimize floods and droughts, a University City to experiment the coming architectural phase...

Also he wrote "The best money can't buy", "Looking forwards", the free ebook "Designing the future", lessons to learn to draw and many many conferences.

Concepts supported by Jacque

Man reflects his culture, government without human intervention, behavior in scarcity and abundance, generalist vs specialist approach, solution to jobs displacement due to automation, elimination of notion of property, products that require very low maintenance, rejection of the opinions system , Nature can be improved in a ecological way, the use of descriptive languages, rejection of use of generalized or holistic words, optimistic vision of possibilities with technology, use of descriptive languages, appreciation of the mechanistic point of view in a non-reductionist way, moving out of spoken language, common needs of every human being like arable land, clean water and air, medical care, a relevant education, ....

Viable System Model

"The VSM expresses a model for a viable system, which is an abstracted cybernetic description that is applicable to any organization that is a viable system and capable of autonomy."

Informally is the application of cybernetics to managing and it's aimed to highly complex modern organizations. It is divided in 5 systems:

System 1 are the primary activities or processes of the system.
System 2 supervises that the processes of System 1 interfere among them as little as possible.
System 3 is like the autonomic nervous system, or a crisis manager.
System 4 is worried about the future of the system.
System 5 is the CEO, it keeps an eye on the systems 3 and 4.

In the VSM, the systems 3,4 and 5 are part of the Metasystem.
The VSM uses the Law of Requisite Variety to ensure Viability.
One of its most important qualities is the recursive quality, inspired in the Bourbaki Set Theory. Every viable system contains another viable system and it is contained in one. According to Beer this reduces complexity.
There are 3 systemic indexes for each process, capability, actuality and potentiality.
There are 3 ratios or dimensionless quotients that change between 0 and 1, generated for the combination between the previous indexes.
Around each average value of a process is statistically defined a band, called taxonomical band, which expresses a range in which a control variable is ok.
If the derivative of the real data is normal, the flows of routine signal is kept, but if a significant statistical deviation was detected, then one proceed to research the reasons, and a different kind of signal was sent to a superior level called algedonic signal.
If the algedonic signal was not attended, it climbed to the next superior system.
While rising through the levels, the loss of information due to averaging was avoided using modeling.
Beer endorsed the use of the unabridged diagram, not the simplified one.

Proyecto Cybersyn

"It was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy."

Cybersyn Project represents the application of Viable System Model to the Chilean Economy.

1 Cybernet

It was a telex network installed in Chile, from Arica to Magallanes, which it took the information given by the companies and carried it to an IBM 360.

2 Cyberstride

It was a software that processed the information of the companies, making use of Bayesian Forescasting of P. J. Harrison and C. F. Stevens, for the filtering and control of data.

3 Checo Project

Model of the chilean economy depicted in a screen through diagrams (javascript framework didn't exist yet)

4 Cyberfolk

It allowed the active participation of the citizens in the democratic process, implemented in 2 places, Tome and Mejillones.

Opsroom

it was the physical place where information from the companies were represented in a "ergonomic" way, through differents screens, one was a quantified flowchart model of the production processes. It should be noted that due to constraint of the time, just the highest viable system has this possibility. One of the requirements while designing it was to avoid to flood with written content its users, no pen allowed. Here you can see a dynamic view and anatomy of the Opsroom.

About the Cybersyn Project

It achieved diminish the effects of the Truck Strike of October of 1972 in Chile.
Although it didn't attain real time information system, it did it at a one "report" per day.
The project was immersed in a chaotic social situation, which in some way allows the execution of the project to a certain extent.
Although while the project was in development Chile was in a economic embargo, this can be overtaken by the international social circles of the members of the project.
With the Coup of 1973, the project ends abruptly.
It has the merit of to be the first application of Cybernetics in the socio-economical area.
It was pretty unknown in Chile itself until recently.

Concepts supported by Stafford

Operational models fed in real time.
Rejection to the administrative time or business cycles, arbitrarily quantified.
Rejection to the bureaucratic planning and hierarchical systems.
Rejection against the computers as giant deposit of dead data or isolated databases.
The feedback concept as in the positive and negative feedback loop, homeostat, homeostasis, complexity, variety, amplifiers and attenuators, good regulator, autopoiesis, circular logic(in a Zen style), and the blackbox vision of the elements of a system.

Stafford Beer Production

Several books, where it stands out "Brain Of The Firm", his concept of Management Cybernetics, his Epistomology, Team Syntegrity, POSIWID and many many conferences.

Other Matters

Stafford mentions that with computers it could be coordinated a giant barter network, however, until recently, others pernicious factors that affect the monetary transaction have been potentially solved through the Blockchain based technologies, and maybe also, with Tangle and others. The same can be said when Fresco talks about the possibility of moving outside of spoken language, because, also recently, it has appeared the brain-computer interface, however the security issues are less developed. Curiously, both technologies rely strongly in Cryptography techniques.

Either the teams of Cybersyn or The Venus project are highly interdisciplinary and both rely heavely in visual designers.

Although both project are unmatched, The Venus Project is ongoing, but there are not comprehensive attempts to revive the Cybersyn project at national level, so far. Code implementations and historical revisions have been made.

If you are curious, there was a Chinese cybernetist called Qian Xuesen, considered the Chinese Father of Rockets and Spaceflight. He established a field called Engineering Cybernetics with a book of the same name in 1954.

Is Universal Basic Income a means to achieving The Venus Project?
Why didn't Jacque give away technical details?
Jacque Fresco about Meditation

Last Annotations

"The skill to perceive the system in numeric terms needs a enormous amount of training" Stafford beer
"The monetary system places a tremendous unnecessary strain on available resources" Jacque Fresco

One could imagine that the Price System has a "price" to society that is possible to avoid through a predominantly visual management of the economy, instead of doing it numerically, call it a "Visual Price System" if you want, free of the cost of abstraction caused due to the use of the number in the economy( no more SAP :D). But the number always appears, together with the scarcity, and with abundance they are unnecessary. Then this mental experiment is dead before starts. It's not so easy to sweep the gradients of the monetary exchange under the rug.

With that said, and according to POSIWID, personally I don't believe in the STATEMENT that a Resource Based Economy is possible, HOWEVER, a system where it is impossible to be financially needy, it's at least, sublime and majestic, and I agree with Fresco that his project is really a Quantum Jump.

Farewell

"But if while designing the controllers of government, we rise the sight to the highest system which is the total system, and we apply the viability criterion to determine the break-even point, the freedom must be a computable function of the efficacy of any system whose goals are known"

"All of these things can be built with what we know today. It would take 10 years to change the surface of the Earth to rebuild the world into a second Garden of Eden."

Main References

Official webpage of Cybersyn Project
Youtube Channel of Javier Livas Cantu
Youtube Channel of the Cybersyn Project
The Venus Project Official Webpage
The Venus Project Youtube Channel
Wikipedia

... @thevenusproject