1 – A Liberty Machine in Prototype, Stafford Beer – On page 43, Beer talks about the idea that the government can retrieve a large amount of information, and then process it down through filters to receive only the information which is important in real time, as a warning or other readout for the officials to use. However, he does not really address very well how this information will be compiled and sent to this processing place, or how they will deal with “public” vs “private” information. He does say on page 46 that less information will be needed, but doesn’t address for example some of the major criticisms of major data collection on private people which has occurred in recent years.

2 – The Free Man in a Cybernetic World, Stafford Beer – Beer talks on page 92 and 93 about mass availability of the faster communications, so that the masses can “engage in their personal evolution – by guiding their own learning, and editing their own input”. Is this something we are moving towards, or have seen pass us by? Is this online wealth of knowledge which we can access allowing us to have personal evolution?

3 – The architectural relevance of cybernetics, Gordon Pask – I was very interested in his definition of “mutualism” in that architects don’t just design buildings, they design systems which humans move through and around. This idea of a building as a small node on a bigger system brings with it a larger definition of what it means to be an architect, as well as his other definition of functionalism which is not just about usefulness in a specific sense but about a more broad sense of purpose in a larger community or ecosystem of people.