The Future Does Not Compute

Thoughts on a Group Support System

This is Chapter 10 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.

Decision support systems have come a long way since the Sixties and Seventies. Time was when Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon could announce with a straight face: “There is every prospect that we will soon have the technological means, through [heuristic programming] techniques, to automate all management decisions.”/1/ From battlefield strategy to commercial product development, machines would increasingly take charge.

While I suspect there is more truth to Simon's prediction than most observers allow -- after all, only a person whose own thinking processes were already largely “automated” could have ventured such a statement -- history has contravened his expectation. Now, some thirty years later, neither the battlefield commander nor the CEO is in foreseeable danger of obsolescence.

We still hear about decision support systems, of course, but they mostly attempt to offer a relatively humble suite of logistical services to the human decision maker. The buzzwords flitting about the research publications tend toward the more modest end of the spectrum: electronic ...