Project Cybersyn (1971) (en.wikipedia.org)

Project Cybersyn (1971–73) was an early national-scale decision‑support system built under Chilean president Salvador Allende to monitor and manage the economy in near real time. Architect Stafford Beer applied his Viable System Model to stitch together four modules: Cybernet (a telex network linking factories to Santiago), Cyberstride (statistical monitoring using Bayesian filtering and Bayesian control), CHECO (an economic simulator for scenario forecasting), and an Opsroom with human operators visualizing alerts and directing responses. Field teams created "quantified flowcharts" of factory processes; daily indices (inputs, outputs, absenteeism) were transmitted to an IBM mainframe, analyzed for anomalies, and escalated across four control levels via algedonic feedback if unresolved. For the AI/ML community Cybersyn is historically significant as a proto–real‑time analytics, human‑in‑the‑loop control system: it combined streaming telemetry, probabilistic filtering, hierarchical escalation rules, and simulation-driven forecasting—concepts central to modern digital twins, operational ML, and control theory. Its emphasis on decentralizing decisions to worker groups and explicit socio‑technical design highlights governance, transparency, and resilience issues now debated around algorithmic management. Practically, Cybersyn demonstrated value (helping coordinate logistics during a 1972 strike) while also inspiring later proposals for computer‑managed economies and prompting enduring questions about risks when automated monitoring is tied to political power.