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Would IOET Make Economics More Behavioral? 183

behavioral economists, and thereseems to be aturntohomosapiens
(Zou & Chen, 2018).
In this chapter we provided supporting arguments on both sides. We first
use the idea of economics as a cyborg science (Mirowski, 2002) and enriched that
idea with ubiquitous networking to form an “optimistic” expectation that
the fading-away homo economicus will be recruited back to the center
of the IoE economy. If this happens, the high time of behavioral economics
will come to a stop, and the “mainstream” (neoclassical economics) will
once again triumph. We then used Simon’s economic theory of attention to indi-
cate that the reverse expectation can also be plausible. According to Simon
(1971), attention is a scarce resource. Simon warned us that the persistent
deficiency in attention may not mitigate the problem of information over-
load, and as long as information overload remains, humans need to cope
with these cognitive burdens with various heuristics and hence they are
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not immune to various biases and errors.
If homo sapiens remains the major species in IoE times, what could the
ecology of the IoE economy look like? What else will happen if machines do
not make men smarter? This question is probably more philosophical than
scientific, and some judgment needs to be exercised for questions like this.
Earlier, Bauerlein (2008) and Carr (2011) argued how “things” can make
humans “dumber”; interestingly, in a reverse direction, O’Neil (2017)
and Stephens-Davidowitz and Pabon (2017) also enabled us to see how vice
versa humans can make “things” dumber. Altogether, an ecological cycle of
these foolish reciprocities can be self-constructing. While this proposition
could run the risk of being an over-exaggeration, this saying recurs through
history. “The road to serfdom” as “paved” by Friedrich Hayek (Hayek,
1944) has not become a relic; that “road,” once in a while is still filled with
“pilgrims”; recently the road has been renovated (Helbing et al., 2017).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of the chapter was presented at the AAAI, 2018 Spring Symposium on Arti-
ficial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything at Stanford University, March 26–28, 2018. The
author is grateful to the organizer of the symposium, Professor William Lawless, specifically

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An assumption underlying this thesis is that even though attention capacity may also grow with the
availability of mind-extension technology, the arrival of information may grow even faster with the
same generation of technology, say, one with an exponential rate, and one with a polynomial rate. A
fundamental cause of this persistent gap is not just technology, but the use of technology by humans,
whose wants are unlimited. Hence, just like speed is never fast enough, bandwidth is never wide
enough, and storage is never roomy enough, our attention is never sufficiently focused.