Thinking Fast and Slow in the Era of GenAI

I have been re-reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast & Slow with refreshed interest lately. It feels like we are all asked to make decisions faster, with more information, and with greater consequences today. In this context, I find it crucial to revisit how we decide to employ the fast, gut decision-making (System 1) and the deliberate problem-solving capabilities (System 2).

Kahneman defines System 1 and System 2 thinking as follows:

• System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
• System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.?

It’s not that one type of thinking is more important than the other – we need BOTH. In a recent interview on the All-In podcast, Sam Altman shared his wishes for the evolution of ChatGPT. I’m summarizing here, but he sees ChatGPT serving as two personas: a speedy Executive Assistant who will streamline tasks to make your life more productive, and a Senior Advisor, who may challenge your requests and help shape and augment the decision-making with good advice. Sam’s hope was that GenAI can context switch at appropriate moments to fulfill both types of personas.

This struck a chord with me on how we see GenAI in a world where there is more data and speed. You want GenAI to think fast to make you more agile and productive, while detecting when to think slow to aid in complex decision-making. It is equally important that we train our own and our future generation’s muscles to discern the information we receive from GenAI. After all, a tool is only as good as the carpenter who holds the tool. If one has read Thinking Fast & Slow, it is also a very honest assessment of our human biases and heuristics. We can’t completely have unbiased decision-making, but we can at least be aware of them with a trained eye.

For the copious decisions I make every day, I think back to this idea and ponder if I am using the optimal tools to make my decisions, both fast and slow. ?