PERSON
Lucy Suchman
The anthropologist who watched someone struggle with a photocopier and discovered, in that struggle, a fundamental truth about intelligence itself—that competent action is not plan execution but improvised responsiveness to the specific, unrepeatable circumstances of the moment.
Lucy Suchman is the analyst of the gap. Her 1987 book
Plans and Situated Actions, written inside one of the most advanced computer science laboratories in the world, made a single precise argument: the dominant model of intelligence used by AI researchers was wrong at its foundation.
Herbert Simon and the cognitive scientists had built AI on the premise that intelligent behavior is plan execution—form a representation, execute the steps. Suchman watched secretaries trying to use a Xerox photocopier help system and found something else entirely: humans do not execute plans; they improvise, reading the situation moment by moment and responding to what they actually encounter rather than what any plan anticipated.
Situated action, she called it, and the phrase was precise: action arises from the specific circumstances the actor faces, not from a blueprint made in advance. The insight reached far beyond photocopiers. It named the precise gap between what AI systems do—generate plausible outputs from statistical