David Maulén

Cybernetics is a science characterized by the utopian search for new relationships between different areas of knowledge. After the Second World War, the best-known references in Western academia were Norbert Wiener’s approaches to this new discipline. However, there is another little-known hemisphere of this development that remains understudied and we claim is key for its history which refers to the pioneering work of scientists, engineers and cultural practitioners in Latin America, as well as the materialization of specific experiences that lead us to reflect on the role that some regional milestones could have had in the global context. This volume of AI & Society covers points of view that were structured in the various most emblematic stages of these trajectories with the participation of agents that went beyond the assimilation and interpretation of external models, transforming themselves into fundamental and pioneering experiences, among others, the work of Mexican scientist Arturo Rosenblueth, or the impact of the concept of Autopoiesis. Through this article we introduce the outcome of the research—presented in great length in the contributions of this volume—on some of the main stages and trends that constituted the evolution of cybernetics in Latin America. The particular contributions of the authors in this issue have helped to reconstituting these contexts while developing a continuous horizon which also explores future practices.

The concept of “Bio-Digital Architecture” is not new and it is within an area of great speculation and few well-demarcated definitions. A key factor in the definition and practice of technology is the difference between its production and use. If we assume that forms of use are also technical, this distinction is intrinsic to countries based on economies without added value and their histories focused on reverting this situation. This article proposes the revision of a paradigm shift in South America that combined the sustainable “Bio Architecture” background from the developmental state with a different economic model era. Through a historical review of the sociology of symbolic production, and the development of devices and interfaces, mechanisms are proposed to recognize paradigm shifts, in a context where technological utopias are associated with the materialization of new social utopias of developing. Focused on specific cases, this research explains the culmination of the principles of “Second-order cybernetics”, in the epistemological formulation of “Autopiesis”, and the early visualization of these principles through digital media in the experience of “Protobio”. Finally, this work concludes with the description of the concrete application of these principles, not in an illustrative way, but in the design of the electronic information architecture of the operating system, continuing with the challenge of translating the logic of the immune system into an economic, political and social context completely different from its predecessors, with “Virus Detection”—VirDet—and “Oyster 2.0”.

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.