I think it's almost criminal how under appreciated this is-- Ross Ashby was able to create self-regulating homeostasis devices using, "analog" equipment in 1948. It's really alarming to me that there seems to be lack of appreciation for the, "cybernetics conferences" period of the development of what we now refer to as Computer Science-- I haven't met a single AI engineer in the field that's familiar with the work of William Grey Walter or John McCarthy (kind of outside scope) and somehow that feels a bit like societal fraud-- It's like a civil engineer not knowing who Archimedes or Issac Newton is or something.
It’s hard though. For Stafford Beer, variety is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. After Bateson’s “the difference that makes the difference”, not all differences are significant.
Currently reading The Grammar of Systems by Patrick Hoverstadt (of the Fractal Organisation). He’s a friend of mine but sincerely I recommended it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences