Richard Herrnstein, one of Skinner’s most-accomplished students, later his colleague in Harvard’s Psychology Department, and a luminary of radical behaviorism, once explained to me that any action regarded as an expression of free will is simply one for which “the vortex of stimuli” that produced it cannot yet be adequately specified. We merely lack the means of observation and calculation. I was a twenty-three-year-old student, and the term was new and startling to me. I never forgot that conversation, perhaps because it came as close as any to summarizing the behaviorist’s conception of God. Indeed, there was a time when if you took the elevator to Skinner’s lab on the seventh floor of the Psychology Department, the first thing you would see was a sign reading “God is a VI,” a variable interval of behavioral reinforcement plucked from the vortex.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1166