The Sciences of the Artificial

Moreover they did not postulate a new man to be produced by the new institutions but accepted as one of their design constraints the psychological characteristics of men and women as they knew them, their selfishness as well as their common sense.

The boundary between knowledge and skill is subtle.

Finally, there has been substantial progress in devising feedback devices that “tame” chaos by restricting chaotic systems, moving within their strange attractors, to small neighborhoods having desired properties, so that the chaos becomes merely tolerable noise. Such devices provide an example, consonant with the discussion in earlier chapters, of

A computer program, UNDERSTAND, simulates the processes that people use to generate an internal representation of (to understand) a problem like A Tea Ceremony.78

Alternatives are also open, in organizing the design process, as to how far development of possible subsystems will be carried before the over-all coordinating design is developed in detail, or vice-versa, how far the over-all design should be carried before various components, or possible components, are developed.

All mathematics exhibits in its conclusions only what is already implicit in its premises,

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.

But as knowledge grows, the role of the professional comes under questioning. Developments in technology give professionals the power to produce larger and broader effects at the same time that they become more clearly aware of the remote consequences of their prescriptions.

No sharp line divides learning things that are already known to others from learning things that are new to the world.