AI-assisted rational decision-making

TL;DR

The paper explores how AI can help with rational decision-making in different types of choices, finding that AI's usefulness depends on the nature of the decision.

Contribution

The paper introduces a framework categorizing decisions into easy, hard, and transformative, and analyzes AI's role in each.

Findings

AI improves efficiency and accuracy in easy decisions.

AI helps create new reasons for decisions in hard choices.

AI cannot resolve transformative choices due to epistemic gaps.

Abstract

AI has become a common assistant for making choices, from minor to major ones. It can inform our beliefs relevant to a decision by both helping us to find existing information and generating new information. But in what ways and to what extent is AI useful when making a rational decision? The present paper provides answers to this question for three different types of choices: easy choices, hard choices, and transformative choices. In easy choices, where the rational action is, in principle, straightforward, AI can make the decision-making process more efficient and accurate, increasing derived value (at least in the long-term). In hard choices, where options are on a par, AI can help us when we commit to an option by assisting us in the creation process of new will-based reasons. In transformative choices, where we cannot, even in principle, know by ourselves which option maximizes expected value, AI cannot fill the epistemic or metaphysical gap characteristic of such choices, and therefore cannot enable rational decision-making. Overall, the analysis shows that if the values of our options do not already allow us to determine the rational choice without AI, its assistance does not change that.