The Irrational Decision

Abstract: This talk traces the intellectual history of automated decision-making to its origins in the post-World War II development of computers. Mathematicians of the 1940s set out to design machines that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. In this pursuit, a cluster of foundational mathematical technologies—including linear programming, game theory, and neural networks—emerged as a foundation for a mathematical rationality, which changed how we think about human decision-making itself.

As the information and data science community knows, these seminal computational methods have grown into a robust discipline and industry with countless success stories. I’ll describe several such successes in accelerating computers, regulating pharmaceuticals, and deploying electronic commerce. These examples will highlight how automated decision systems excel in specific sweet spots with clear rules, well-defined goals, and well-constrained contexts.

However, most of life, for better or for worse, doesn’t fit into neat mathematical models. Even in our data-driven world, we make decisions based on values, emotions, and incomplete information that can’t be reduced to optimization problems. I will thus close by exploring how to best harness eighty years of unfathomable computational progress while preserving human agency and judgment.

This talk is drawn from Recht’s forthcoming book The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us. It will be published by Princeton University Press in 2026.

Bio: Benjamin Recht is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Ben studies the foundations of machine learning, be they mathematical, statistical, and computational, or philosophical, sociological, and historical.