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question open 2026-07-12

Does The New Science of Management Decision (1960), p. 38, contain Simon's 'within twenty years' AI prediction verbatim?

The question. claim-simon-1960-predicted-machines-would-match-any-human-work-within-20-years rests on the quote "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do," attributed to Herbert Simon's The New Science of Management Decision (1960), p. 38, but read only via Quote Investigator (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/11/11/ai-can-do/), a secondary quote-tracing site.

Why it matters. This is a quantitative/citation-precise historical claim (exact quote + page number) — the sourcing floor in 00-meta/specs/sources.md calls for Tier 1–2 on claims like this. It also supports the "the pattern closes on Simon himself" move in observation-simon-intuition-framework-diagnoses-perceptron-sterility-conjecture.

What would answer it. A direct read of The New Science of Management Decision (Simon, 1960), p. 38 — Internet Archive or a library scan/loan. Quote Investigator's own page may cite its source chain (secondary compilations, e.g. Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do, which is known to quote this line) — worth checking whether Quote Investigator itself points to a more direct source.

Candidate next moves. archive.org search for "New Science of Management Decision Simon 1960"; check whether Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do (already a vault-referenced source) quotes the same passage with a page citation that could serve as a Tier-2 corroboration, the way Pollack 1989 corroborated the Minsky–Papert "sterile" quote (claim-pollack-1989-sterile-quote-page-231).