The Sciences of the Artificial

The claims of monetarists, and especially of the “rational expectations” theorists, that government is helpless to influence employment levels by using the standard Keynesian tools of monetary and fiscal policy and that attempts to reduce unemployment can only cause inflation, are based on the assumption that public responses to these measures will

Moreover they did not postulate a new man to be produced by the new institutions but accepted as one of their design constraints the psychological characteristics of men and women as they knew them, their selfishness as well as their common sense.

Laboratory experiments have shown that material can usually be learned more rapidly with understanding than by rote, is retained over longer periods of time, and can be transfered better to new tasks.81

A design representation suitable to a world in which the scarce factor is information may be exactly the wrong one for a world in which the scarce factor is attention.

But, contrary to libertarian rhetoric, we are not monads. From birth until death, our ability to reach our goals, even to survive, is tightly linked to our social interactions with others in our society.

The real subjects of the new intellectual free trade among the many cultures are our own thought processes, our processes of judging, deciding, choosing, and creating. We are importing and exporting from one intellectual discipline to another ideas about how a serially organized information-processing system like a human being—or a computer, or a c

Only human pride argues that the apparent intricacies of our path stem from a quite different source than the intricacy of the ant’s path.

Nothing in the new technology increases the number of hours in the day or the capacities of human beings to absorb information.

we can often predict behavior from knowledge of the system’s goals and its outer environment, with only minimal assumptions about the inner environment.