In the Age of AI, Decision-Making Is a Human Superpower

4 Essential Principles For Better Human Decision Making In The AI Era

Jul 21, 2025

When he became the heir to the French throne at age 6, Louis XVI couldn’t have been living a better life.

He had what most six-year-olds want: lots of toys, great snacks whenever he wanted, his own huge bedroom. Of course, like most of us when we were six, he wasn’t allowed to make any of his own decisions.

Yet unlike most kids, as Louis grew up, he still wasn’t allowed to make decisions. Even small ones. His strict, cautious father overprotected him. Despite being next in line as king, Louis was made to study Latin and religion, but not economics or politics. He got plunked down in the court as a ceremonial figure, but wasn’t allowed to get involved in statecraft. At no point did Louis receive an education in how to make good choices.

And then when he became King, he went down in history as one of the most terrible decision-makers of all time.

Louis XVI was indecisive at every turn. He often waffled based on what the most recent person had told him. When he did make big decisions, they were often extremely, even obviously poor ones. He tended to use short-term thinking rather than take the long view a king ought to.

The French kingdom was broke, but Louis decided not to tax anyone but the peasant class. When given the opportunity, he then decided not to give the peasant class voting rights. No decision-making for them, either. And he committed a massive portion of France’s purse to the American Revolution, a vanity play for France versus Britain that earned the destitute French economy essentially zero in return.

Soon after that the peasants chopped Louis XVI’s head off.

Louis XVI wasn’t a bad decision maker because he was a fundamentally dumb person. He certainly wasn’t a bad decision maker because he lacked resources. He was a bad decision maker because he was spoiled. He had what appeared to be a luxury: other people making decisions for him. But as we see, that luxury ruined his life.

We live in an era where the story of Louis XVI could become our own. Not because they’re bringing the guillotine back (last I heard, that one wasn’t in the Big Beautiful Bill). But because Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude give us an “easy button” to offload our decision making to a computer.

Children who grow up with ubiquitous AI tools are likely to become worse at decision-making than any generation before them. And we, the adults experiencing the AI revolution before those kids grow up, are already becoming worse at making decisions for ourselves.

As we get more of these AI easy buttons, we’re liable to get more out of practice making decisions. "What neighborhood should I move to for my kid’s school? Thanks, ChatGPT, I'll move to that one!" (I literally had this ChatGPT interaction yesterday myself, so I'm no Innocent here.)

And yet, as technology becomes more and more powerful, the decisions we humans make will become more important. For those wielding physical and economic weapons, certainly. As business and community leaders, of course. And as family members and team members and citizens—absolutely.

So the question is this:

How can we remain good at making decisions as it becomes easier to ask machines to make decisions for us?

As a journalist and human behavior researcher, I’ve written several books about how innovators and teams in history make breakthroughs in problem solving, business, leadership, the arts, and social movements. That work has built up, over the last few years, to a chewy topic that I think could not be more timely for leaders and workers today: Wise Decision-Making. Specifically, I’ve looked at mountains of scholarship on decision-making through the lens of Wisdom. And though great, relevant material exists from the pre-COVID era (including some incredible books which I recommend), in the post-pandemic there has been fascinating new psychology and neuroscience research on decision-making, and new human behavior insights which haven’t come to light for a lay audience.

I've been distilling this research, combining it with time-worn insights and using it to rethink what we take for granted about decision making. Over the next several weeks, I’m going to publish a series of columns on the subject of human decision making in the era of artificial intelligence. But for today, I’d like to share a few conclusions.

Conclusion 1: Better Decision Making Requires Us To Ask Better Questions

We live in the Podcast Q&A Era. The Interview Era. The Ask A Chatbot And You Shall Receive Era. We are witnessing question-asking all day long, and we are asking questions constantly.

The questions we ask ourselves—and the ones we feed into our AI of choice—determine the quality of information we receive. And quality information is required for good decision making.

This is why decision making requires us to get better at asking questions in general. In particular, we humans need to think in terms of second-order questions, two-part questions, and being aware of the hidden trap of offering multiple choice questions instead of open-ended questions that will teach us more.

Conclusion 2: Better Decision Making Hinges On Separating Observations from Hypotheses

The human brain is fast. We can observe, process, theorize, and conclude in milliseconds. So when we’re faced with important issues—say, a problem or dilemma to resolve—we naturally tend to skip the first few steps of the Scientific Method and jump into what we think about the information we’ve just received.

We make better decisions when we step back from what we think and articulate what we’ve observed first. Separating facts from stories helps us to make sure we’re telling ourselves the right story. It helps us be able to consider others’ perspectives. And it helps us to ask better questions.

Conclusion 3: Better Decision Making Requires Us To Understand Humans’ Values (Especially When They Conflict)

AI is programmed by engineers. (And, increasingly, by AI itself.) Engineering is a discipline that does not prize (or much factor in) the nuances or priorities of human psychology. Engineering prioritizes math. Decision making in the real world is complicated because consequences affect different people differently.

With human diversity (which the world, and likely many of the teams you belong to, has plenty of) comes different values. Different people prioritize different things. And that often benefits us greatly. (A designer valuing user experience and a programmer valuing page speed leads to a great website, whereas if both people valued page speed you might get something fast but useless.)

Good decision making is about understanding that your own values and needs and others’ may not align, and that the consequences of your decisions may affect others in ways you don’t want down the line. Louis XVI valued different things than the peasants… and they cut his head off when he prioritized only his values.

Conclusion 4: Better Decision Making Requires Us To Think In Terms Of Systems

Like Louis XVI, we often make poor decisions because we only think of the immediate consequences. (Why tax the rich when they’re you’re friends, and they’re right there in the room with you and that would be uncomfortable?!)

Wise decision making, on the other hand, factors in what happens next.

Decisions carry immediate effects, and they carry ripple effects. And in a world as interconnected as ours, unless you’re getting a tattoo on your own body, most big decisions we make will affect the larger system around us in some form.

That’s why today’s leaders, workers, and citizens need to use systems thinking. If you remove the chain from a bicycle, you have no bike anymore. If you ask Claude to tell you whether you should sign that legal contract or not, you’d better ask ‘em what the potential second-order effects of doing so could be. (And maybe still ask your lawyer, while you’re at it!)

It’s been said many times since the dawn of the Internet that people are willing to trade rights to things like privacy and personal data for the sake of convenience. And that’s proven to be true. But we’re entering an era where we’re not just agreeing to Cookie Terms & Conditions anymore; we’re giving up thinking in exchange for quick answers.

So will we spend the energy to stay in control—to keep captaining our decision-making ships?

In the long run the answer to this will make the difference between whether or not we lose our heads.

Thank you so much for reading!