Science Quote by Herbert Simon

Simon is doing something quietly radical here: he demotes technology from protagonist to stagehand. “Technology may create a condition” is a deliberately deflationary clause. It grants tech its obvious power to reshape the environment, then immediately pivots to the human problem it can’t solve: what we choose, tolerate, and excuse once the new conditions arrive. In Simon’s world of bounded rationality, people aren’t flawless calculators; we satisfice, we cope, we rationalize. So the real emergency isn’t the gadget. It’s the self that will use the gadget to amplify its worst shortcuts.

The sentence structure is the tell. He moves from “may” to “better” and “better” again, shifting from observation to moral imperative. That repetition reads like a scientist’s version of a sermon: not mystical, just urgent. “Questions” are framed as the active ingredient, implying that without self-interrogation, technological change becomes fate. This isn’t anti-tech nostalgia; it’s a warning about abdication, the habit of treating our tools as alibis.

Then he lands on a phrase that sounds almost embarrassingly intimate for a Nobel-level mind: “find ways to like ourselves.” Subtext: societies that don’t cultivate self-respect outsource it to metrics, consumption, and machine feedback. If you don’t understand yourself, personalization will do it for you. If you don’t like yourself, you’ll ask technology to anesthetize the discomfort. Simon’s context - postwar systems thinking and the rise of computing - makes the point sharper: the more we can engineer our surroundings, the less excuse we have for not engineering our character.