CONCEPT
The Relocation of Bounds
Simon's framework applied to the AI age: the bounds of rationality have not been removed but relocated — from generation, where they no longer bind, to evaluation, where they bind harder than before.
The relocation thesis is this volume's central analytical claim: AI has relaxed three of the four constraints that produced bounded rationality — information, computation, and time — while leaving the fourth, attention, intact. The result is not the transcendence of bounded rationality but the relocation of its binding constraint. In the old world, the binding constraint was generation: the builder could not produce alternatives fast enough. Information was scarce, computation was expensive, implementation took months. In the new world, the binding constraint is evaluation: the builder cannot assess alternatives wisely enough. Generation is cheap. Evaluation remains as expensive as it always was, because evaluation requires attention, and attention is a property of consciousness rather than of the information environment. The relocation produces the specific asymmetry of AI-augmented work — unbounded generation meeting bounded evaluation — that drives every behavioral pattern the volume analyzes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The relocation is invisible from