What Happens When AI Is the President’s Advisor?

The flaws in human decision-making are well-known. Presidents and their advisers have always had to guard against confirmation bias, our tendency to interpret evidence in light of our pre-existing beliefs and to under-weigh or dismiss facts that point to the contrary. We know humans have selective attention, an instinct to hone in on facts that are more vivid and to overlook others. Presidents are not immune from these tendencies.  

In my view, there is an even more insidious danger lurking within our AI use. Presidential decisions represent countless underlying judgments. Reasonable people can differ on each of the estimates, and those differences are part of what presidential judgment must resolve. Flattening them up into a probability assessment obscures more than it reveals because it does not show which indicators were seen as credible and which were ignored.  

Consider the night of May 1, 2011. President Barack Obama had gathered his advisors to assess intelligence that indicated Osama Bin Laden was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. If the intelligence was correct, he would send in American troops. But his trusted, experienced advisors, all looking at substantially the same data, offered individual estimates ranging from roughly 30% to 95%.