Rory Sutherland

Very, very interesting.

I mean, the whole question of the decision sciences is, I think, at the moment, completely critical.

And actually, by the way, it'll be very, very interesting with AI.

Because I keep hearing people saying, you will say to your AI, find me a skiing holiday, and it will provide you with a perfect skiing holiday.

And I keep saying, people don't decide like that.

At the very least, you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose.

Because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.

Do you see what I mean?

It's a sort of freakish element of free market capitalism, which is we can only like something if we choose it in preference to something else.

Well, among real estate agents, there's apparently a kind of little bit of a trick, which is you always, before you show someone the house you want to sell them, you show them a less appropriate house, ideally that's slightly more expensive, say, so that when they see the house that you want to sell them,

It's now clear-cut because they can say, ooh, it's a bit cheaper than the other one, and it's got a conservatory.

There's contrast.

So there's a kind of decoy effect, a bit like the famous economist experiment with the decoy effect.

So, you know, one of my interesting questions is, you know, what interface will AI deploy to help us make choices?

And will it make the mistake that you could very easily make?

If you think about it, nobody clicks the I'm feeling lucky button on Google.

think it's still there isn't it it's been there for years and they've removed it and found that it slightly reduces the appeal but the number of people who actually click it i i'm feeling lucky take me straight to a single page is vanishingly small people want to choose between you know effectively above the fold options

And so, you know, I'm just intrigued because it's very, very easy, I think, for people with an economic or tech background to make assumptions about what people are trying to do and how they choose and that we're, you know, utility maximizers and all this kind of thing, only really to be completely wrong.

Do you think we're looking for efficiency in the wrong place?

We usually do, in the sense that when you pursue efficiency, there are quite a few problems.