The Universal Information System -- A Fantasy or a Feasible New Product

Abstract

The notion of a plannable economy that dominated economics and business administration well into the 1960s left significant traces in the design of economic planning, guidance and control systems of the real firms (Eliasson 1976a). The idea that firms should be organized as logical planning machines is still very strong and the notion that the “system”, or the visible assets of the firm, embodies the technology, know-how or competence to run the business keeps recurring in literature. People can come and go. The system is what matters.

If at each stage the motion of a machine… is completely determined by the configuration, we shall call the machine an “automatic machine”.

For some purposes we might use machines (choice machines….) whose motion is only partially determined by the configuration…. When such a machine reaches one of these ambiguous configurations, it cannot go on until some arbitrary choice has been made by an external operator. This would be the case if we were using machines to deal with axiomatic systems.

A.M. Turing (1936, p. 232)