Fernando Flores

Carlos Fernando Flores Labra ( born January 9, 1943 in Talca, Chile) is a Chilean politician, engineer and philosopher.

Flores was technical director of the nationalized under Salvador Allende businesses. In collaboration with Stafford Beer, he tried to introduce scientific management and organizational techniques that are based on the latest findings by the cybernetic Cybersyn project in the Chilean Wirtschaftssteurung. Due to the success of the project he was finance minister.

Shortly after Augusto Pinochet staged a coup; Flores was imprisoned from 1973 to 1976 in a warehouse. With the support of Amnesty International, he was able to emigrate with his family to Palo Alto ( California).

He worked with Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus, John Searle and Ann Markussen and had success as a computer scientist. His ideas of philosophy and organization of work he further developed and was influenced here by Martin Heidegger, Humberto Maturana and John Langshaw Austin. Together with the American computer scientist Terry Winograd, he wrote a book in which criticized both approaches the just emerging Artificial Intelligence 1986.

After his return to Chile, he was from 2001 to 2009 Senator of the provinces of Arica Parinacota and Tarapacá - for the social democratic Partido por la Democracia (PPD). He tried in late 2004 - without success - the candidate of PPD for the office of President of Chile to become. In 2010 he was adviser to the president-elect Sebastián Piñera.

Writings

• Terry Winograd: Understanding computers and cognition: a new foundation of design, Ablex Pub, 1986.