CONCEPT
The Technology of Foolishness
March's 1971 concept of the organizational and individual practices that enable action without prior justification — the necessary complement to the technology of reason, and the capacity AI most dramatically threatens.
March argued in a deliberately provocative 1971 essay that one of the most important capabilities an organization could possess was the capacity to act without reasons — to do things that could not be justified by rational calculation, to pursue goals that had not yet been defined, to play. The argument proceeded from an observation about the limits of rational choice: the model assumes decision-makers have preferences, that preferences are consistent, and that decisions are made by selecting actions that best satisfy them. But in the most consequential decisions — about what to do with a life, what organization to build, what values to pursue — preferences are not given in advance. They are discovered through action. You do not first know what you want and then act to get it; you act, observe what happens, and discover what you wanted in retrospect. This discovery-through-action requires foolishness: the willingness to act before preferences are clear, to experiment without knowing what the experiment is testing,