Jay Wright Forrester

Yeah.

But I would, I would love it if like maybe rather than reading the Slinky book, there was more like Jay Forrester system dynamics, you know, from the like manufacturing, uh, kind of stuff from the 1970s and then I think just like a mathematical, like understanding of, of how the system works, like if you had to model it, um-

Yeah, I was gonna ask-

But then you know, like-

And it's only in the second half of the 20th century that that incredible acceleration of construction and fabrication has happened, again, driven by this spook to the floor process of extraction.

So that's the kind of context that this sits in and that ties very nicely to this work that was done by this group of MIT scientists in the 1970s which emerged out of the very beginnings of system dynamics, which was created by another American computer scientist called Jay Forrester, system dynamics, which actually came to sit behind computer games like Sim City.

That was the kind of the basis for that being so popular in the 1990s.

And the MIT scientists were basically looking at If you feed all the variables around population, pollution, food production, all these things into a kind of graph and model the period from the start of the 20th century to 2100, what will happen? And they're doing this as a kind of exercise to inform the future.

So I used to teach systems science at MIT.

Jay Forrester was a professor at MIT, for many years felt that systems science should be taught at the kindergarten level.

So without the knowledge of systems in the modern world, you're basically an ape walking around with a slingshot trying to figure out this world.

You really, it's all very quite inaccurate.

And Barry was an instructor at Dartmouth College, and he'd worked with a lot of other individuals in the systems thinking space, including Donella Meadows, who did the Limits to Growth work in the past.

He studied under Jay Forrester, who actually came up with the concept of system dynamics.

So I worked with him for many years until his untimely death.

And since then, I've been an independent consultant.

It will bring stability to our planning processes.

If you look at the sort of parallel development in fields like cybernetics or among Jay Forrester, who's a Sloan professor of business who worked on these kind of industrial automation and cybernetic kind of schemes, what you see is that the anxiety of a lot of managerial thinking in this period is uncertainty.

that we're going to make wrong decisions at the wrong times, or we're going to mistime our decision-making, and that's going to make matters worse.

And I think the computer is the promise that you can plan better for that.

So it's systems thinking that's going to free people.

Jay Forrester was a professor at MIT.

And he came from the Midwest.

He wanted to make systems science a course that would be taught at the kindergarten level.