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Plans and Situated Actions
Suchman's 1987 landmark that dismantled the planning paradigm in AI by showing — through close study of people using a photocopier — that intelligent action is improvised, not executed.
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication was Lucy Suchman's 1987 revision of her Berkeley anthropology dissertation, published by Cambridge University Press. The book's unassuming title concealed a foundational argument against the entire edifice of classical artificial intelligence: that intelligent behavior is not the formation and execution of plans but the improvised, moment-by-moment responsiveness of agents to specific circumstances. Through close analysis of users struggling with a Xerox photocopier equipped with an AI-based help system, Suchman demonstrated that the machine's planning model bore almost no resemblance to what users actually did. The book reshaped human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of mind, and its arguments return with renewed force in the age of large language models.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's target was the dominant AI paradigm of the 1980s: expert systems and goal-based planning, which assumed intelligence consists of representing goals, forming plans, and executing them. This paradigm organized billions of dollars