The Sciences of the Artificial

But somehow, untutored intuitions about self-regulation without central direction do not carry over to the artificial systems of human society. I retain vivid memories of the astonishment and disbelief expressed by the architecture students to whom I taught urban land economics many years ago when I pointed to medieval cities as marvelously pattern

procedures instead of optimizing strategies that work well only when finely tuned to precisely known environments.32

Fulfillment of purpose or adaptation to a goal involves a relation among three terms: the purpose or goal, the character of the artifact, and the environment in which the artifact performs.

The thesis is that certain phenomena are “artificial” in a very specific sense: they are as they are only because of a system’s being molded, by goals or purposes, to the environment in which it lives. If natural phenomena have an air of “necessity” about them in their subservience to natural law, artificial phenomena have an air of “contingency” i

We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches.

The claims of monetarists, and especially of the “rational expectations” theorists, that government is helpless to influence employment levels by using the standard Keynesian tools of monetary and fiscal policy and that attempts to reduce unemployment can only cause inflation, are based on the assumption that public responses to these measures will

We see in uncertainty a frequent source of advantage of organizations over markets as decision-making mechanisms.

The heart of the data problem for design is not forecasting but constructing alternative scenarios for the future and analyzing their sensitivity to errors in the theory and data.

Thus the traditional definition of the professional’s role is highly compatible with bounded rationality, which is most comfortable with problems having clear-cut and limited goals.

too—but the (perhaps temporary) dominance of our species over the globe today is witness to the augmentation of human reason—applied to local, not global, concerns—that has been made possible by these social artifacts.