top of page

BOUNDED

RATIONALITY

Bounded rationality was first proposed in the 1950s by Herb Simon, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and a founder of the field of artificial intelligence- the idea is bounded rationality. Bounded rationality states that all decision-making agents, be they human or machine, have limits imposed by their computational resources (IQ, compute hardware, etc.), time, information (either too much or too little). For AI and robots the limits include the algorithms- the core programming. Even humans with high IQs make dumb decisions when they are tired, hungry, misinformed, or stressed. And no matter how smart, they stay within the constraints of their innate abilities.  Only in fiction do people suddenly supersede their innate capabilities, and usually that takes something like a radioactive spider bite. 

bottom of page