Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition

First stage: At first, there was no response.

It is possible, if one sets aside the long-run social benefits, to look upon invention as a hostile act—a dislocation of existing schemes, a way of disturbing the comfortable bourgeois routines and calculations, a means of discharging the restlessness with arrangements and standards that arbitrarily limit.

But Herbert Simon, a cautious student of these matters, has said that “Insofar as we understand what processes are involved in human creativity—and we are beginning to have a very good understanding of them -none of the processes involved in human creativity appear to lie beyond the reach of computers.”

This was the second stage—the attempt to meet Sims’s claims by logical, rational rebuttal.

The basic elements, the gun, gear, and sight, were put in the environment by other men, men interested in designing machinery to serve different purposes or simply interested in the instruments themselves.

That is why the bureaucracy develops in any social system—to collect, retain, and supply this information in an orderly way.

The interesting question seems to be whether man, having succeeded after all these years in bringing so much of the natural environment under his control, can now manage the imposing system he has created for the specific purpose of enabling him to manage his natural environment.

The deadlock between those who sought change and those who sought to retain things as they were was broken only by an appeal to superior force, a force removed from and unidentified with the mores, conventions, devices of the society. This seems to me a very important point. The naval society in 1900 broke down in its effort to accommodate itself t

But I suggest that recently we’ve spent a good deal of time on improving the machine and that for a while we ought to concentrate on the other end. The problem is not primarily engineering or scientific in character. It’s simply human.