Joe Arvai, University of Southern California Dornsife – The Hidden Risk of Letting A.I. Decide

The Academic Minute

What’s the harm in letting A.I. make decisions for us?

Joe Arvai, Director of USC Wrigley Institute for Environment & Sustainability and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California Dornsife, explores one.

Dr. Joe Árvai is the Dana and David Dornsife Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology, and he is the Director of the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California.

Joe’s research focuses on improving the critical thinking, judgment, and decision-making capabilities of people. His research focuses primarily on contexts where people must make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty, and where they must confront tradeoffs across conflicting social, economic, and environmental objectives. His research also focuses on situations where people’s instinctive approach to judgment and decision-making is biased by unchecked emotions and motivated reasoning.

In advance of this agenda, Joe and his lab of post-doctoral scholars and graduate students conduct research aimed at improving our understanding of how people intuitively make judgments and decisions about, primarily, environmental issues and sustainability. They couple this research with the development and testing of tools and approaches that can be used by people to improve decision quality across a broad range of environmental, social, and economic contexts. Decision quality, in this case, is measured by the degree to which people’s values and objectives align with their ultimate judgments and choices.

All of this research conducted in Joe’s lab is applied, and accounts for judgment and decision-making by a broad spectrum of public and stakeholder groups, as well as by technical experts, business leaders, and policy-makers. Likewise, Joe and his group conduct research across a wide range of contexts, ranging from environmental risk management to consumer choice and policy-making.

In addition to Joe’s wok at USC, he is a frequent advisor to government, business, and NGOs. He is a former member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chartered Science Advisory Board, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Environmental Change and Society. He is also a Senior Researcher at the Decision Science Research Institute in Eugene, OR, and he is an Adjunct Professor in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

In his spare time, Joe likes to make photographs, ride motorcycles, and climb mountains.

The Hidden Risk of Letting A.I. Decide

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As AI creeps further into our lives, we’re becoming more concerned about what it’ll do to us.

Maybe the most high-profile concern has to do with the AI doomsday scenario, sparked by Hollywood blockbusters. As someone who studies decision-making, I worry about a different risk: namely, our reliance on AI making us less skilled and disciplined at making thoughtful and defensible choices.

A good decision-maker requires a carefully developed skillset. which, can be boiled down to three important steps:

Step one: Develop a clear understanding of the pending decision. This step hinges on obtaining the information needed to fill knowledge gaps and challenge our prior assumptions and beliefs.

Step two: Find a few options that will form the basis of our final decision. Then consider which will best address our priorities. This will help us defend our choices later.

Finally, step 3: Exercise the self-discipline required to delay closure on a decision until after we’ve completed steps 1 and 2.

It’s human nature to want to be as quick and efficient as possible when it comes to making choices. We often cut corners and expose our decisions to all kinds of biases. We also tend to like having decisions made for us, which brings us back to AI.

Handing more and more of our daily decisions over to AI magnifies the risks of corner cutting because it presents answers devoid of our own understanding and deliberation, robbing us of opportunities to practice making thoughtful, defensible decisions.

How we think and decide is already under siege thanks to social media.

All the more reason to resist the siren’s call of AI and retain ownership of the true privilege – and responsibility – of being human: Being able to think and choose for ourselves.

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