Behavior: Decision Theory: Guide to Choice-Making

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Decision theorists would argue that the general ought to pool judgment to the unemotional logic of the computer. Why? To begin with, a computer is better able to assimilate a great many variables, such as a drunken indiscretion and the movement of troops, to weigh them rapidly and to come up with a statement of mathematical probability, taking them all into account. Human judgment, faced with the same variables in a highly charged and fluid situation, simply cannot equal the machine's precise and unbiased capacity to calculate the probabilities and odds.

At a more ordinary level, the human with $40,000 to spend on a house wagers that sum on the real estate market. He has little idea what it will buy him, but he has already decided what he wants. He usually underestimates such changing influences on the price as the locale, the season and even the necessities of the individual house seller. This is the kind of judgment that, in Ward Edwards' opinion, the computer can make better than man.

No Heart. But there are other kinds of situations. A father teaching his son how to play chess will throw game after game to his opponent rather than discourage an apprentice skill. This is obviously not a probability decision. The computer can tell the father how to win. It might even tell him that letting the son win will help the boy learn only up to a point, and then achieve the opposite results. But it can scarcely tell him how important it might be to show love by throwing a game. Such considerations go beyond logic and probability.

Because he is an incorrigible humanist, Edwards does not foresee the day when man will entirely yield decision-making to the machine. But he is certain that together they would make a good team. "What is crucially human in decision-making is the evaluation process," he says. "Once the human being has assigned the values, the task of making the best decisions—that is, of computing man's own values in the most efficient way—is merely computational in nature and is best left to the machine." He is convinced, for instance, that a computer, swallowing data from a physician, would come up with a better clinical diagnosis than the doctor.

If there are defects in decision theory, one of them may be in nominating the computer to be more than it is: an adjunct of human intelligence. Whatever rudimentary reason a machine possesses is owed entirely to its creator and cannot exceed it. To propose that the builder pass judgment to his artifact is in itself an act of risk-taking—and scarcely any of the probabilities have been calculated.