Even though computer technology may challenge one of man's last andmost cherished illusions-that he alone is capable of thought-it can

also show him how to live in harmony with nature.

Special Feature:

Prometheus or Pandora:The Influence ofAutomationon Society

Herbert A. Simon ICarnegie-Mellon University

The title ofmy talk * today mentions two Greek myths:the myth of Prometheus and the myth of Pandora. Thesemyths have come remarkably close to mirroring theWestern view of potentialities of technology. On the onehand, the myth of Prometheus tells about the man whostole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. Hispunishment was to be chained to a rock and fed upon dailyby a vulture. But despite what happened to Prometheus,the myth implies that fire was at least good for man.The Pandora myth, on the other hand, suggests that

human curiosity (and by extension the search for know-ledge) can sometimes lead to evil rather than good. AsPandora opened the box, evil spirits flew out, and she wasunable to close the lid again. We have held these twoparallel but contrasting attitudes about technology per-haps as long as technology has been around.When I speak about computer technology this after-

noon, I am not speaking about things-hardware, for ex-ample. Rather, I'm talking about the ideas behind thepossibility of manufacturing that hardware. Technologyis basically human knowledge, the sort of knowledge thatPrometheus stole from the gods: knowledge of how to dothings, not simply the hardware that embodies thatknowledge.

I emphasize this because sometimes we have the feelingthat if we know how to do something we have to do it.Well, it's true that if we know how to do something we areusually very much tempted to try. But occasionally we doforebear. The United States knew how to build an SST,but we decided we didn't want to build one. Those whodid go ahead and build it are feeling it in their pocket-books today.

So, sometimes we know how to do things but we decidenot to do them. I think most of us reached the conclusion inthe last couple of decades-because ofa variety ofsoberingexperiences-that increasingly we must use technology not

simply to do things but to help us to know what things weshould and should not do. More and more, we need tothink of technology as knowledge about possibilities.When chemists used technology to produce DDT, they

provided us with an insecticide that eliminated malariafrom large parts of the world. But technology also permit-ted us to discover that DDT had many side-effects-someof them undesirable.Today we have severe problems with respect to energy,

environment, and the interaction of energy with environ-ment. And we must rely increasingly on our ability tomodel those effects and all of those complicated interac-tions as a way of deciding what are sensible things to doabout the problem.

Let me speak then more specifically about computers.It's commonplace now to say that the computer is bring-ing with it a second Industrial Revolution. In the first In-dustrial Revolution, the revolution of the steam engineand the internal combustion engine, human and animalmuscle power was augmented with the mechanical powerof machines-steam and gas engines. Thus, most of theenergy that does productive work in the world-certainlyin the Western world-is mechanical energy. And now webegin to see that the computer augments human thinkingpower in the same way that the steam engine augmentedhuman muscular power.

Increasingly, the mental tasks of our society-routinemental tasks, to be sure, but mental tasks nonetheless-are being done by computers or with the aid of computers.All of this has taken place within the last 35 years, and weare convinced that this is only the beginning. With theadvent of VLSI technology, I think we are more con-vinced than ever that this really is a second IndustrialRevolution.'This article is based upon a special address originally presented at Comp-con Spring 81, Feburary 25, 1981, in San Francisco.

0018-9162/81/1100-0069$00.75 t198t IEEENovember 1981 69

How much of a revolution you think it is depends agreat deal on what you think a computer is. Some peoplestill think computers are number-crunching devices-that if you open the lid of a computer and look inside,what you find are numbers. Now, I do not have to tell youthat when you open up a computer and look inside, youdon't find numbers. You find electomagnetic fields asso-ciated with various kinds of physical devices.

Well, what does it matter whether you find numbers orelectomagnetic fields? It matters because those elec-tromagnetic fields can represent any kind of symbols, notjust numerical symbols. They can represent anything thatwe can call a symbol or a pattern, and they can be used inall of the ways in which human beings use patterns. WhenI write on the blackboard in the classroom, I can put num-bers on the blackboard, I can put words on the blackboard,or I can draw pictures on the blackboard. The blackboardcouldn't care less!What we have learned about the computer, and what

the world needs to learn about it, is that it is a perfectlygeneral symbol-manipulating device. I will just assert theusual Turing theorem: "Anything that can be done withsymbols can be done with a garden variety, general-purpose, programmable computer."

There is a hypothesis about such devices which some ofus believe very deeply: that being a symbol system-i.e.,having the basic capabilities of reading symbols, writingsymbols, storing symbols, comparing symbols, erasingsymbols, copying symbols, and branching as a result ofcomparison-that possessing those capabilities withrespect to patterns is a necessary and sufficient conditionfor a system to do what we call "thinking."Not everybody believes that hypothesis. But I think our

assessment ofhow far this computer revolution is going togo, our assessment ofhow large an impact the computer isgoing to have upon our society, depends upon our assess-ment of the hypothesis. It depends upon what subset ofthose tasks that we call intellectual tasks can be pro-grammed for a computer.

All of you have had to deal with budgets. You knowthat not all of the things that can, in principle, be pro-grammed on a computer are things that you can afford.But of course a major significance of the VLSI devel-opments, and the whole trend of computer hardware inthe last 35 years, is that the things we could not afford lastyear will be affordable next year. And the growth of therange of activities of computers-not merely their speedor size but the range of things we get them to do-is, ofcourse, paced by what we can afford in hardware.

It is one thing to try to program a chess game on a com-puter that has 10,000 words of core and quite another totry it on one with a million words, or a few million words.In spite of that, it's fair to say that hardware has been con-tinually in advance of software over the last 35 years. Inthe years that I have been engaged in artificial intelligenceresearch, the real limit on the speed of advance of Al andits application to human affairs (which is really onlybeginning now) has not been hardware. Rather, it hasbeen our own ingenuity in figuring out how to use thathardware.

Sure, life is going to be easier when we have Lispmachines and don't have to do everything seven levels up

from the hardware. But the rate at which we get com-puters to do not merely bigger jobs but more intelligentjobs is going to be determined, over the next decade atleast, primarily by the ingenuity of people in the Al com-munity and in the software field generally.Now the remainder of my rermarks are predicated on

the assumption that something like the symbol systemhypothesis is true: that we've only seen the very begin-ning, and that we've only seen computers used in our so-ciety in a very tiny range of their potential uses. I'm notsimply talking about home computers that will operatethe kitchen stove. We already know how to do that withservomechanisms.

I'm talking about an ever-widening range of computerapplications that are now thought to require largeamounts of human thought, like delivering a lecture (or,maybe more difficult, listening to one). When we begin totalk that way, concerns arise not only among the laypublic, but especially among those of us who are in dailycontact with this technology and who see the direction inwhich it is going.

One of the first concerns that arises is the effect ofautomation on employment. It is a very natural concern.If you have an office with a bunch of clerks sitting on highstools keeping books with quill pens, the only reason thatyou would replace those clerks with a computer is that youthink that you could get the job done cheaper. Thus itfollows as night the day that you will have fewer clerks onhigh stools! So people worry, as they worried from thetime that automatic looms began to appear in the textileindustry, and as other kinds of early machinery appeared.People worry about what automatic machinery will do forunemployment.

The level of employment in a societyhas nothing to do with that society's

level of productivity.

Now on this I think there is a fairly clearcut answer.There aren't many things that today's economists agreeupon. But one thing they do seem to agree upon-and onefor which they have excellent evidence-is that the level ofemployment in a society has nothing to do with that socie-ty's level of productivity. You can have full employmentin highly productive societies; you can have full employ-ment in societies that are not productive at all. And youcan have unemployment in both.By most measures, the productivity of our society has

increased by a factor of 20 in the last century. A centuryago, or a little more, it took about 85 percent of our workforce just to feed the whole population, as it still does in

countries like China and India. Today, about 3-5 percentof the population are engaged in farming. That numberincreases somewhat if you count the people who manu-facture fertilizer and other related products. Never-theless, a very small fraction of the people'it took 100years ago to produce all of our farm goods and servicesproduce them now.

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Well, where are the other farmers? Are they unem-ployed? I suppose that there are some ex-farmers who areunemployed. But not very many of the unemployed todayare ex-farmers! In a very obvious way, a society is capableof making use of the human resources it displaces by in-creasing productivity. As a matter of fact there is a verywell-known economic law, called Say's Law, that showsthat the vulgar arguments about unemployment andautomation must be wrong. Say's Law simply says if youadd up all of the costs that are paid out in the process ofproducing goods-the wage costs, the material costs, theland costs, the interest costs, the profits, etc. -it turns outthat all of these numbers are exactly equal to the amountthat people have in their pockets available for spending.That is just an accounting identity; the books wouldn'tbalance unless there were as many payees as payers.

So production, in that sense, creates its own purchasingpower, its own demand. And if there are problems ofmaintaining full employment in a society, it is not becausethe society is too productive. It would be very dangerousfor us to begin thinking that our problems in the world to-day are problems of overproductivity-and that really iswhat the argument against automation amounts to. Ourworld is not too productive.Maybe one could argue that the United States only

lacks a slightly more perfect system of distribution, thatwe already produce all the things we need. The word"need" is very treacherous when applied to human cir-cumstances. I was out near the marina looking at all ofthose boats this morning. Well, who needs them? If youare an ardent sailor, a boat might be the most "needful"thing in the world. But apart from that sort of philo-sophical argument, if we look at the world as a whole, wecan see that "scarcity" is still a fundamental aspect of thehuman condition. And increased productivity is still oneofthe things that we have to bring about in this world. Thecomputer-along with the automation that it pro-duces-is one of the ways that we are going to do that.

During the Great Depression, there was a great outcrythat one ofour problems was that we were too productive,and that somehow or other we would have to avoid auto-'mation and productivity in order to solve the problem.Well, we solved that problem: we had a war. We solved itfor a good long time, about a whole generation. Today,somehow or other, we consume all of the goods we man-age to produce. This is two or three times as much as wecould have produced during the depression, even with fullemployment.

Similarly, therewas a little worryabout automation backin 1966. President Johnson appointed a National Commis-sion on Technology, Automation, and Productivity. Thiscommission looked into the matter and arrived at essential-ly the same conclusion that I'm stating today- that this is anon-problem and that there are plenty of real problemsaround that we ought to be putting our minds to.

There are variants of the unemployment argumentwhich suggest that, while it would be possible with in-creased productivity to employ a whole population, cer-tain parts of the population are going to be made un-employable. In this context you very often hear two con-

tradictory arguments. One is that if we introduce morecomputers into the workplace, the unskilled people andthe stupid people of our society are going to be un-employed. The other argument is that the work force willbe over-educated and over-trained, having no one to per-form the menial tasks of our society.

I don't know any way of proving one argument or theother, but there are a couple of things you ought to thinkabout before you believe either one. First, they bothassume that somewhere there is a profile of jobs and skillrequirements in society, and that somehow or other thepeople in society have to fit that fixed profile.

I remember reading years ago about a man from outerspace who landed in a UFO. When newspaper reportersinterviewed him they asked, "What surprises you most ofall?" He said, "What really surprises me most of all is thestrength of the evolutionary forces-the way in whichhuman beings have adapted themselves to the environ-ment. I notice that all of the doors are just high enough tolet people through them."Now whenever you get into an argument about whether

the people are going to fit the environment or the environ-ment is going to fit the people, you have to ask yourselfwhether both sides of that equation may not be ad-justable-whether the actual spectrum of jobs a societyprovides does not, in fact, adapt itself to the level ofhuman intelligence in that society. We have to rememberthat there are a number of Western nations that havereached nearly the same level of productivity as theUnited States, but which have very different educationprofiles from ours. Most Western European countrieshave a much smaller percentage of college-trained peoplethan the United States. Yet they are able to master thesame high level of technology and achieve nearly the samelevels of productivity.

There is another fact that you might keep in mind: theskill levels required for different kinds of jobs in our societyhave been very carefully assessed. You can get big thickmanuals that show you what kinds of jobs there are insociety-tens of thousands of them-and what skills andhow much training people need for those jobs. If you ex-amine those statistics carefully, you will find that about 70percent of the jobs in our society today require skills thatare less complex than the skills needed to maneuver in SanFrancisco traffic. And yet 95 percent of our entire popula-tion is licensed to maneuver in traffic in San Francisco.

So I think we have to be very careful about assumingthat through automation we are going to create a societyin which the unskilled are going to be unemployed. True,the unskilled have the highest unemployment today.There are many reasons for that, including some thatdon't make much sense. One is that employers requireselection criteria, and one cheap criterion is available byasking applicants to put a check mark on the box oppositethe highest year of education completed. Then the em-ployer picks the candidates with the most years. A lot ofthat goes on in hiring, and I think it has a fair amount todo with the distribution of employment by skill levels andparticularly by educational levels.

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The other outcome is possible too. It might be, par-ticularly if what I have said about symbol systems and ar-tificial intelligence is correct, that through automation weare going to eliminate all of the skilled jobs in oursociety-like electrical engineering, for example. Most ofus, when we started in Al research a generation ago,thought that progress would be very rapid in automatingsensory inputs and motor outputs, while progress wouldbe very slow on automating those deep and profoundthings that are done in the heads of engineers, college pro-fessors, and other deep thinkers in our society.

It has turned out to be exactly the reverse. These think-ing tasks, the ones performed by the most central part ofthe central nervous system, are the ones that have beenmost successfully simulated on a computer: medicaldiagnosis, chemical engineering, problem-solving inphysics, and mechanical design, to name just a few. Onthe other hand, we have made very little progress indeedin simulating the human eye, the human hand, and theircoordination. So, if we are talking about who is going tobe automated, college professors are going to be auto-mated a long time before bulldozer drivers.

I'm not commenting on which of these is the more in-teresting job. But again I remind you of the man fromouter space and the fact that the job spectrum in a societythat has computers is going to adapt itself to the range ofhuman intelligence as well as to the range of computer in-telligence available in that society.

While we need to be thoughtful about these issues ofunemployment, we need to be particularly thoughtfulabout the short-run impacts of the installation of auto-matic systems in particular workplaces on the people inthose workplaces. Nothing I have said has argued thatthere aren't such transient effects. But I think the worryabout the long-run effect on employment is somethingthat we can put aside for a long, long time, if not in-definitely.

I'm not going to say very much about the transient ef-fects here, although there is a good deal that could be said,beyond the observation that our society should and cantake account of those effects and do it better than we havein the past. The idea that everything is going to happen ina rush is certainly wrong. We have already seen a genera-tion of increasing automation in both offices and fac-tories, and in most cases where dramatic new technologieshave come in, as with computer typesetting or automaticswitching of telephone networks, we have been able tohandle the displacement problem simply by not replacingpeople lost through normal attrition. In most cases, pro-cedures of this sort will probably take care of a good partof the transient change. Certainly we have seen no largedisturbances in our society over the last 35 years that werecaused by worker displacement through automation.

Let me talk a little more specifically about the work-place and about the direct impingement of automation onthe workman. In this connection we often hear aboutworker "alienation." The word was first used in this con-text by Karl Marx 100 years or more ago-not in referenceto computers, of course, but in reference to the first In-dustrial Revolution. The alienation argument is that as

you introduce machinery, whether it be thinking ma-chinery or muscle machinery, into the factory or office,you dehumanize jobs and you alienate workers.

Well, let's look at that argument empirically. One ques-tion you can ask is, since there has already been extensivemechanization and automation of the workplace in theUnited States in the last generation as a result ofcomputers,if this does cause alienation, shouldn't it show up? For-tunately we have data on that. The data are based on at-titude studies made over a period of 25 years or so by theMichigan Bureau of Survey Research and by other organi-zations. These surveys asked people how satisfied they werewith their jobs.

We have seen no large disturbancesin our society over the last 35 years

that were caused by workerdisplacement through automation.

That is a tricky question to ask. If a fellow says, "Oh,I'm satisfied," what does that mean-"I'm not going tojump off the Golden Gate Bridge today?" These are hardquestions to ask properly. Nevertheless, if you conductthe same survey year after year and sample the same kindof people, then if there is a real change in job satisfaction,a real appearance of alienation, it ought to show up in thestatistics.

Well, no such indication shows up. There simply is noevidence in the data for a decline in the job satisfaction ofAmerican workers over the last generation. You caneither say that they are just as satisfied now as they were 25-years ago or you can say that they are just as dissatisfiednow as they were 25 years ago.Now, we have all read the accounts of Lordstown,

Ohio, where there was widespread worker unrest anddissatisfaction over assembly-line work. But let me re-mind you that the assembly line is not a true reflection ofmodern automation. The assembly line is a mode ofmechanization that is rapidly being outmoded. It dependsvery much on the human worker being tied into the pro-ductive process at the "micro" level. Modern forms ofautomation generally involve much less routine workthan does the assembly line.The question of job quality also has to be viewed more

broadly. You have to compare the clerk on the high stoolwith whatever job that clerk is performing now. We knowthat a few years ago our society reached a peak in the frac-tion of the work force engaged in manufacturing. Perhaps40 percent of the labor force was engaged in manufac-turing. Now it is down to about 35 percent, and it continuesto go down. So when we talk about the effects of automa-tion on the pleasure of the job, we have to look not merelyat the jobs that were automated, but also at the changingcomplexion of jobs in society as a whole. We know thatthey are tending to shift from manufacturing operations toservice operations. And although we should not roman-ticize about service occupations (they include some menialjobs that I, at least, do not find very engaging), it doesn'tappear that these occupations are particularly more alien-ating than the occupations they displaced.

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An Englishman named Alasdair Clayre did a very in-genious study. There is a lot of romanticism about theGolden Age-that uncomplicated age before industriali-zation, when everyone went out to the fields every dayunder blue skies, when everyone did his work in the freshair, singing while he worked. Clayre had the ingeniousidea of trying to find out what people sang about whenthey worked. What he discovered should come as no sur-prise to anyone who has ever done much manual labor:rather than singing about the pleasures of work, workerssang about what they were going to do when they got offwork.

Clearly we have to be very careful about supposing thatautomation necessarily brings alienation to the work-place. However, there is much that you, as designers ofcomputer systems, can do to humanize the workplace. Aswe all know, equipment that is going to be used by humanbeings ought to be human-engineered at the man-machineinterface. Of course, it never is. The ratio of humanengineers, people who by any stretch of the imaginationhave a particular professional competence to design man-machine interfaces, to hardware engineers must be about0.00002. I do notice in the the last couple of years inSilicon Valley and elsewhere a revival of interest in humanengineering. Maybe for the first time in human historysome real attention is going to be paid to this in the designof equipment.

But by and large, the issue is not merely whether the con-sole we sit in front of degrades gracefully or interacts withus in friendly wise. A more important issue is whether weare designing total offices and total factories where humanbeings will have comfortable human experiences duringtheir work days. The concern of the human engineer in thedesign of equipment and particularly in designing systemsneeds to focus on the whole system and not simply on theman-machine interaction.

There is a parallel question that has to do with the homecomputer: I often hear that the real revolutionary effect ofthe computer is going to be in the home. When people arepressed for details, they mention computer games, and theymention the stove that goes on and off intelligently.Perhaps the most interesting thing they mention is wide-spread access to large data bases, like the experiment that isgoing on in England through cable television, where peoplecan get access to various kinds of reference libraries, so tospeak, on their home television sets.

Well, again we have to keep in mind that for most humanbeings most of the time, the most important thing abouttheir environments is the other human beings in those en-vironments. And the fact that you have some computersaround doesn't change that very mnuch.A second point: if we are worried that people are going to

become pathologically involved with their machines andare going to stop interacting with other human beings, thenthe thing that we ought to worry about is not the computer,but TV. Television has been around a little while already,and perhaps it is having effects on our society that are not

entirely beneficial-reducing intelligent human conversa-

tion, for example, and replacing it with unintelligent hu-man conversation.The implication of this discussion for our topic, I think,

is that we need to put ourselves on some empirical founda-

tion when we talk about the revolution the computer isgoing to make in the home. I think it is going to be a verymodest, very slow revolution.One other set of issues needs to be borne in mind when

we talk about this automated future: the relation of com-puters and automation to privacy and freedom. Here againwe have to recognize that technology is not some ex-ogenous variable being imposed on us, not somethinggiven. Technology is something that we, collectively as asociety, as individuals in that society, must design. Whetherthat technology has good or bad effects on us is going todepend upon the skill with which we design it.We hear many sensational stories these days about com-

puter embezzlement. Indeed, computers have given peoplewith larcenous motives access to large sums of money thatthey would not necessarily have had easy access to before.

But let's face it, there have been and will continue to becomputer embezzlements. At the same time that computersgive men of ingenuity new ways to embezzle, computersgive auditors new ways to audit. And we have the usualcompetition that we have in any security -system: Are westrengthening the offense or the defense faster? Since I'venot heard a discussion of that by people knowledgeable inthe art, I'm not sure what the answer is. But it seems to methat the power of the computer for auditors, who out-number embezzlers, should strengthen the defense at leastas much as the offense. If it doesn't, it is probably a defectin our design, rather than something deep in the nature ofthings.Or take the matter of credit checking. I don't like to

have my credit checked, but it was happening a long timebefore there were computers. It was done by hand. I don'tknow what in the world was in those files, how it got there,how it was evaluated, or how it was edited. Now, we havelaws which make those files accessible to me-a provisionwhich was possible with hand-administered systems butdifficult to enforce. We can begin to insist on standardsfor keeping those files, for what may go into them andwhat may not go into them. And we have the technologyfor auditing, for the enforcement of those standards.

So I don't know whether computers are going to makecredit systems better or worse with respect to invasion ofprivacy and with respect to distributive justice-that is, towho gets credit. But I think that depends on how intel-ligently we use the technology, whether we use it to protectthe people on whom credit ratings are being made as well asto increase the power of our credit rating capability.We worry about the same things with respect to security

files. My own security clearance investigations havealways been exceedingly interesting-a circumstance I at-tribute to the fact that I grew up in the Great Depressionand went to the University of Chicago. Out of curiosity,about a year ago I wrote to the FBI, under the Freedom ofInformation Act, and asked for my file. I got it. One ofthe first things that struck me was how haphazard theywere. They were all done without benefit of computer. Iworry a little about security agencies having access topowerful computers, but again I know that we can alsouse the same computer technology to impose various re-quirements on such agencies as to how security systemsare administered.

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Although we certainly need to be vigilant about ourpersonal civil liberties, I'm far from convinced that theyare endangered more in a society where lots of computersare around than they were endangered in societies wherethe sleuths worked by hand. I would like to call your at-tention to the fact that the Nazi regime in Germany wasable to round up and murder some millions of peoplewithout any benefit of computers at all.

Right now, there is a very active set of issues about cryp-tography. It will be interesting to see how we balance outthe needs of national security for the ability to breakcodes against the needs of individuals to have security intheir own communications. It is a very unsettled issue inour society. As people knowledgeable about this tech-nology, we have a special role and a special responsibilityto helo settle it.

The most important impact of thecomputer revolution is going to be

on our view of ourselves.

My own hunch is that the largest impact of the com-puter revolution will not be simply in providing us withnew toys in the home or new productive capabilities in thework place, however important those might be. The mostimportant impact of the computer revolution is going tobe on our view of ourselves.When NASA went into space, I think it had a great emo-

tional impact on us in the 1960's and 1970's-not becausehuman beings touched down on the moon, although thatwas very dramatic-but maybe most of all because we sawpictures of our earth taken from space. I don't think I haveever met anybody who wasn't moved by those pictures ofthat fragile, bluish, little wispy sphere out there in the mid-dle of space. It really made Copernicus's point, didn't it?We aren't the center ofthe universe. Our galaxy isn't the

center of the universe. We are just here together on a littleplanet in orbit around a minor star near the outskirts of atypical galaxy. That picture made a reality of the phrase"Spaceship Earth," and I think it contributed a great dealto the concern that we have had about environmental mat-ters in the last 15 years.Now there have been various points in human history

when man has suddenly attained a new perspective on theconditions of his existence. The first one I have alreadyalluded to. The Copernican Revolution, occurred whenman had to acknowledge he had no special claim to a placeat the center of the universe. The second one may be theDarwinian Revolution, when Darwin argued that man wassimply one creature that has evolved along with all othercreatures. At each of these points we have had to relinquisha cherished belief in our own uniqueness. And now com-puters are challenging another closely held conviction: thatonly humans possess the ability to think.

If the symbol system hypothesis I proposed earlier iseven nearly true-and of course computers will tell us in-creasingly to what extent it is true or not-then thinking isnot unique to man. Thinking is a characteristic that isshared by man with other species, including artificial

species like the computer, which can manipulate symbolsin a very general way.Now we can react to that claim in a variety of ways.

One-the most common to date-is disbelief. That putsthe question aside, for awhile at least. The second reactionis to look for some other respect in which we are unique. Asfor myself, I've run out of ways of being unique.

But I think there is a third reaction, a reaction that is verysimilar to our reaction to that picture of the earth fromspace. It is to realize, perhaps for the first time in humanhistory, that we are a part of the world; that we are a part ofthis vast machinery; that man is not outside nature, thatman is not above nature, but that man is a part of nature.

If we can make peace with ourselves on those terms, itwill have at least one desirable byproduct: As we design newtechnology, as we make use of our knowledge about theworld and the knowledge that we are gaining about our-selves, about our thinking processes; through research inAl and cognitive simulation, we will realize that we have toapply our technology in a way that keeps man's peace withthe universe in which he lives, instead of conceiving ourtechnology as a weapon with which man can wage war onthe rest of nature.-

Herbert A. Simon is Richard King Mellonuniversity professor of computer science

[w o iand psychology at Carnegie-Mellon Uni-versity, where he has taught since 1949.During the past 25 years he has been study-ing decision-making and problem-solvingprocesses, using computers to simulatehuman thinking. He has published over500 papers and 20 books and monographs.He was elected to the National Academy

of Sciences in 1967. He received the Distinguished ScientificContribution Award of the American Psychological Associa-tion and the A. M. Turing Award of the ACM, and he waselected Distinguished Fellow of the American EconomicAssociation. He received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize ineconomics in 1978.He has been chairman of the Board of Directors of the Social

Science Research Council and of the Behavioral Sciences Divi-sion of the National Research Council, and he has served as amember of the President's Science Advisory Committee.

Educated at the University of Chicago (PhD, 1943), he hasbeen recognized by honorary degrees from a number of univer-sities.

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