Artificial intelligence and human decision making

Decision is obviously related to reasoning. One of the possible definitions of artificial intelligence (AI) refers to cognitive processes and especially to reasoning. Before making any decision, people also reason, it is therefore natural to explore the links between AI and decision making. This paper distinguishes between two aspects of decision making: diagnosis and look-ahead. It is shown that, on the one hand, AI has many relationships with diagnosis (expert systems, case-based reasoning, fuzzy set and rough set theories). On the other hand, AI has not paid enough attention to look-ahead reasoning, whose main components are uncertainty and preferences. These aspects of AI and decision making are reviewed in the paper. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.