John Agar
speaker
129 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
John Agar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So they were really deeply interested in breaking down those boundaries between thinking and non-thinking, living and non-living.
And of course, this upset people.
There were people in the 1940s and 50s, same time as when Turing was working, when Greywater was displaying his tortoises, when Norbert Wiener was publishing cybernetics, who were deeply, deeply upset by this idea there might be something troubling because it was suggesting that there wasn't anything unique about the human mind, that you could recreate the human mind in machines and
And that seemed deeply, deeply threatening.
So even something like the friendly tortoises would provoke actually quite disquiet and denunciation even on the BBC.
Greywater gave talks on the BBC and very heavyweight respondents came in and said, you're talking nonsense.
So there's another British cybernetician called Stafford Beer, who is another very interesting, slightly eccentric figure, slightly an outsider figure.
who has an epiphany when he reads Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, thinks this is a clue to how to understand organisations.
Briefly, he's employed by United Steel in Sheffield.
He proposes to reinvent technology.
The steel industry on cybernetics terms, they show him the door.
He then does management consultancy for a bit.
And then he gets a call from Chile.
And Chile had a long history of democratic government.
I had recently elected Salvador Allende, a socialist who had nationalized parts of the Chilean economy and wanted to think about how to manage all these new big organizations that the Chilean state now had to manage.
And they'd heard of cybernetics and they'd heard of Stafford Beer, who had published on management cybernetics and said, come to come to Chile.
You can rearrange the state for us.
And he joined this Chilean team and together they produced this extraordinary plan, partly implemented, which would gather information from telex lines from around the country, gathering them together at a central control room.
And this control room, I do encourage people to have a look it up online.
Project CyberSyn stands for Cybernetic Synergy.
Showing 61–80 of 129 · page 4 of 7
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