Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein outlines the promise and limits of artificial intelligence
Imperfect Oracle is about the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is better than we are at making judgments. Its limits are evidenced by the fact that AI cannot always make accurate predictions―not today, not tomorrow, and not the day after, either.
Natural intelligence is a marvel, but human beings blunder because we are biased. We are biased in the sense that our judgments tend to go systematically wrong in predictable ways, like a scale that always shows people as heavier than they are, or like an archer who always misses the target to the right. Biases can lead us to buy products that do us no good or to make foolish investments. They can lead us to run unreasonable risks, and to refuse to run reasonable risks. They can shorten our lives. They can make us miserable.
Biases present one kind of problem; noise is another. People are noisy not in the sense that we are loud, though we might be, but in the sense that our judgments show unwanted variability. On Monday, we might make a very different judgment from the judgment we make on Friday. When we are sad, we might make a different judgment from the one we would make when we are happy. Bias and noise can produce exceedingly serious mistakes.
AI promises to avoid both bias and noise. For institutions that want to avoid mistakes it is now a great boon. AI will also help investors who want to make money and consumers who don’t want to buy products that they will end up hating. Still, the world is full of surprises, and AI cannot spoil those surprises because some of the most important forms of knowledge involve an appreciation of what we cannot know and why we cannot know it. Written in clear, jargon-free English and grounded in deep understanding, Imperfect Oracle provides a distinctly useful perspective on this complex debate.
Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University. He has served in multiple positions in the U.S. government, and in 2024, he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Department of Homeland Security's highest civilian honor. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. His many books include On Liberalism, Manipulation, Conformity, and the bestsellers Nudge (with Richard Thaler), Noise (with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony), and The World According to Star Wars.
