Herbert Simon's 1960 prediction that middle management would automate first reads eerily true today
JMateosGarcia · x · 2026-10-03
Revisiting Herbert Simon's 1960 paper in the AI era strikes readers as uncannily prescient. Simon predicted automation of well-structured problem-solving would proceed extremely rapidly, that work would shift from human-paced to machine-paced, transforming supervision — and that middle-management activities would be automated more completely than others. Commentators call him "50 years too early" and wish he were writing about AI today.
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