Metaphorum 2026 · The World in Torment: A Time Whose Ideas Has Come

Insufficient Variety and Artificial Intelligence

In my interactions with Stafford before he died, he was constantly making apparent that he was searching for a better world, but at the same time he was deeply aware that ongoing human processes were not supporting this outcome. Perhaps efforts towards a less chaotic and better managed complex world could help overcoming these limitations. Cybernetic methodological contributions could be platforms for the effective management of policy issues. This is what I want to offer in these conversations from the perspective of WOSC. More transformations of environmental inputs into necessary economic outputs, may help seeing the world as ecological systems, reducing instances of failure and increasing examples of good performance. Attention to interactions, relationships and complexity are contributions to increasing the possibilities to make things happen in a chaotic world. People need to deal with shared concerns, more specifically they need to work with shared policies in chaotic situations of high complexity. Disagreements and collaboration require their shared attention. It is in these contexts that managing complexity is a challenge. Ross Ashby offers in his book “An Introduction to Cybernetics” (1964) the Law of Requisite Variety, but it is in Stafford Beer’s book “Designing Freedom” (1972), that a great and most useful contribution to this law is given to society and management. Following this, in my early work with Nigel Howard (Espejo and Howard, 1982) we highlighted the “Law of Insuficient Variety”, which I elaborate in my methodological work (Espejo, 2025). My emphasis now is on poiesis to produce desirable worlds, in the context of enframing them in cyber-systemic models. From a cybernetic perspective I expect a focus on correcting variety imbalances among the myriad of relationships producing our world. Thus, this is an invitation, following Stafford’s work to use the law of requisite variety in the world we are producing over time. We are aware that First and Second Order Cybernetics could be powerful contributions towards better societies in a complex world. In our view the complexity of policy issues has ontological and epistemological underpinnings that cybernetics and systems may help to structure better. Adequate relationships and resources may help people and groups to develop better structures. These are structures to produce better policy issues, underpinning social issues through language and related meanings. Stronger organisational structures are necessary for more ethical and cohesive elaboration of policy issues. This is a challenge for Artificial Intelligence. Speaker: Raúl Espejo — World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics

Schedule to be confirmed