Are we talking the Cybersyn that was conceptualized or the Cybersyn that was actually built? In both cases not really, it was meant as a coordinating and regulating system for the entire (state-run) economy, not just a string of warehouses with an e-commerce front-end. While amazon does some amazing adaptive planning with neural nets they aren't really planning on a grander scope than putting the maximum amount of assorted parcels in a truck. It's for sure an exceedingly complex supply chain that has to be more adaptively navigated than thoroughly planned, but Cybersyn was trying to do that for all of the things - and make these processes steerable towards any desired goal. Of course, with only like 400 telex machines and one ibm mainframe, they didn't exactly meet these goals within the 2 years before the coup. For all it's shortcommings (and in part because of them), Cybersyn was still successfully utilized to break a CIA-instigated trucker strike by diverting resources from striking companies towards those without strikes, so... Make of that what you will.
Not so much, it wasn't concerned at all with consumer use cases, only with production and distribution. So, if it had succeeded, farms and factories would've had Cybersyn terminals to report production. This was a huge deal at the time, far more important than most people realize, and for many reasons. While one can find early Soviet theoretical writings favorably applicable to Cybersyn-related concepts post hoc, by the 1960s, the Russian bureaucracy had begun to ossify and nobody wanted to lose their jerb to a computer, so anything that might've been adjacent or complimentary to what Chile was attempting would've been banned outright. So along comes Chile, with some of the largest copper reserves in the hemisphere, copper essential to the new postwar electronic order, and says "Let's use these newfangled computers to do some really good Communisms!" and then they didn't fuck around, they started hiring some of the most prestigious theorists and engineers in the world at the time, while Allende was the first to break Cuba's political isolation by hosting Fidel Castro in Chile. Even hosting Castro alone could've gotten the country coup'd, but Nixon's administration was aware of Cybernsyn. It was not a secret project. It did, however, scare the absolute shit out of a lot of people in the U.S. So not only did Allende get coup'd, but the fledgling Cybersyn network was completely destroyed, collages ransacked for documents, and researchers jailed and tortured. All of this after several noted CIA/imperialist rags in Chile had spent months denouncing Cybersyn as some kind of sci-fi totalitarianism. Thereafter, Chile's economy under Pinochet was remade into one which was not merely Capitalist, but Neoliberal Platinum Deluxe.
By comparing it to Amazon I meant the tracking devices that workers in warehouses wear to monitor efficiency. I was talking out of my ass, you obviously know more about it than me. The cybersyn room does give me vibes from the original rollerball movie tho.
Cybersyn is cool but isn't it just prehistoric Amazon?
Are we talking the Cybersyn that was conceptualized or the Cybersyn that was actually built? In both cases not really, it was meant as a coordinating and regulating system for the entire (state-run) economy, not just a string of warehouses with an e-commerce front-end. While amazon does some amazing adaptive planning with neural nets they aren't really planning on a grander scope than putting the maximum amount of assorted parcels in a truck. It's for sure an exceedingly complex supply chain that has to be more adaptively navigated than thoroughly planned, but Cybersyn was trying to do that for all of the things - and make these processes steerable towards any desired goal. Of course, with only like 400 telex machines and one ibm mainframe, they didn't exactly meet these goals within the 2 years before the coup. For all it's shortcommings (and in part because of them), Cybersyn was still successfully utilized to break a CIA-instigated trucker strike by diverting resources from striking companies towards those without strikes, so... Make of that what you will.
Damn that's cool.
Not so much, it wasn't concerned at all with consumer use cases, only with production and distribution. So, if it had succeeded, farms and factories would've had Cybersyn terminals to report production. This was a huge deal at the time, far more important than most people realize, and for many reasons. While one can find early Soviet theoretical writings favorably applicable to Cybersyn-related concepts post hoc, by the 1960s, the Russian bureaucracy had begun to ossify and nobody wanted to lose their jerb to a computer, so anything that might've been adjacent or complimentary to what Chile was attempting would've been banned outright. So along comes Chile, with some of the largest copper reserves in the hemisphere, copper essential to the new postwar electronic order, and says "Let's use these newfangled computers to do some really good Communisms!" and then they didn't fuck around, they started hiring some of the most prestigious theorists and engineers in the world at the time, while Allende was the first to break Cuba's political isolation by hosting Fidel Castro in Chile. Even hosting Castro alone could've gotten the country coup'd, but Nixon's administration was aware of Cybernsyn. It was not a secret project. It did, however, scare the absolute shit out of a lot of people in the U.S. So not only did Allende get coup'd, but the fledgling Cybersyn network was completely destroyed, collages ransacked for documents, and researchers jailed and tortured. All of this after several noted CIA/imperialist rags in Chile had spent months denouncing Cybersyn as some kind of sci-fi totalitarianism. Thereafter, Chile's economy under Pinochet was remade into one which was not merely Capitalist, but Neoliberal Platinum Deluxe.
By comparing it to Amazon I meant the tracking devices that workers in warehouses wear to monitor efficiency. I was talking out of my ass, you obviously know more about it than me. The cybersyn room does give me vibes from the original rollerball movie tho.