Tobias "Tobi" Konitzer

And fundamental problem because it's unobservable.

But that is the way that we have to think if we want to make progress in these fields.

So that's one.

And then the other person I named, Danny Kahneman and all the school of behavioral economists who put a big question mark on this ridiculous assumption of early economic theory, which was the rational voter, the rational individual, humans as entities that make rational decisions.

What Kahneman, I think, very successfully showed, and he's a Nobel laureate, of course, and the first, I think, basically the godfather, father of behavioral economics, was that human decisioning is most of the times awful.

And human decisioning is awful not because necessarily there is bias, even though there is, but I think his big contribution is to show that bias is just one factor in the weakness of human decisioning.

The other one is noise.

And we talked about this too.

When you have had a bad breakfast, you make a bad hiring decision.

If I'm in a bad mood, I don't play as nicely with my girls.

Makes no sense.

It's not bias.

It's noise.

It's just circumstantial.

It's idiosyncratic.

So where does that leave me?

It leads me to say that I do want the future of machine decisioning, certainly in marketing, certainly in sentencing, certainly in diagnosis and treatment.

But the big question is, how does the human in the loop

get positioned?

And how do we avoid a world in which we turn the entire decisioning process over to a black box that we call agentic AI?