Irrational decisions
Humans make irrational and emotional decisions. But why?
What separates humans from all the other creatures sharing the Earth with us? One difference is of course our capacity for rational thought and logical decisionmaking. Then there's our now 50,000-year-old legacy of supplementing our natural capabilities with increasingly sophisticated tools-everything from labor-saving devices to medicines to, most recently, smartphones.
But are we humans always rational? Do we always use our tools optimally? Well, no. Just think of the last time you made a hasty snap decision when deeper analysis would have been better. Or you procrastinated on work in favor of more time catching up on social media.
We live in such an interesting time, where our most ubiquitous computing devices-smartphones-are equal parts Swiss Army knives of powerful capabilities and, when we're not careful, the ultimate time thieves. But that is changing as cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence move out of the labs and into our lives. Because one thing AI does very well is make recommendations by studying data (about you, about the weather, about diseases, about everything), delivering insights that would otherwise elude us.
It's just one small step from AI-powered recommendations to AI-powered decisions made on your behalf. But there are two important questions to answer before we hand over decision-making duties to our favorite devices. Do we want technology making decisions for us in the first place? And, if so, what's gained and what's lost when smart machines become even more central to our day-to-day lives?
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