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Plans and situated actions
Argues that machines designed around planning models miss the inherently situated nature of human communication. Actions emerge from context and interaction, not from pre-formed plans.
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Machines designed on planning models miss the situated nature of human communication. Suchman’s core argument: human action is not the execution of a plan but an improvised response to the circumstances at hand. Plans are resources for action, not its blueprints. An AI that treats conversation as plan-execution will perpetually misread what is actually happening between people.
Published 1987, reissued 2007 by Cambridge University Press.