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How AI Can Help You Make Better Decisions
A little over a decade ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with key members of the IBM Watson team. It was shortly after the system’s triumph over human competitors on Jeopardy! and everyone was trying to put the event in context. Would computers be, as Watson’s Jeopardy rival Ken Jennings joked, our new overlords?
Yet when I spoke to the IBM people, the concept they were most focused on was collaboration. “Now I have the power of the world’s 1000 best cancer specialists standing behind me, guiding me through this case that I’m working on,” Manoj Saxena, who was leading the Watson business at the time, told me.
Today we all have access to systems far more powerful than Watson on our personal devices and we all need to figure out for ourselves what we want that collaboration to be. How can AI systems help us make better decisions? How can it help us achieve more of what we want? When should we rely on our own judgment? The answers are beginning to come into focus.
What Our Guts Really Tell Us
With funding from the US Military, Gary Klein set out to find out how people make decisions under pressure by studying those who work in high pressure environments. One story was that of a fireman who responded to a routine kitchen fire. While they were spraying water on the fire, he felt…
