PERSON
Herbert Simon
The polymath who dismantled the myth of the perfectly rational decision-maker and replaced it with the bounded, satisficing human mind—and whose 1971 observation that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention has become the most precise available account of what AI does to the people who work with it.
Herbert Simon is the rarest kind of intellectual: a man who changed, quietly but permanently, the foundational assumption of two separate fields. In economics he replaced the fiction of Homo economicus—the perfectly rational calculator who evaluates every alternative and selects the best—with the bounded, satisficing human being who searches sequentially through options until she finds one good enough. In computer science he co-founded, with Allen Newell, the field of artificial intelligence, building the first program to demonstrate that a machine could solve problems in ways that resembled human thought. The Nobel Prize in Economics came in 1978; the Turing Award in 1975. Between them, Simon navigated psychology, organizational theory, and the philosophy of design, always asking the same underlying question: given the actual cognitive constraints of bounded minds, how should the systems around them be built? His 1971 observation—that information consumes attention, and that
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