Making Wise Decisions in a Smart World

Peter Verhezen

• 07 maart 2023
• 9789811268076

Samenvatting:

Good and smart decisions should be distinguished from wise decision-making — especially in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) where algorithms are increasingly used to automate business processes or to augment the accuracy and speed of decisions. This book argues why specific forms of intelligence as well as consciousness and enhanced conscience are crucial to make wise decisions — with consciousness to be clearly distinguished from intelligence. It also addresses why machine learning and smart computers (AI) are plausibly able to make 'smart' (and thus to a certain extent 'intelligent') decisions but definitely unable to help us to become wiser. In essence, optimizing a desired output in a business context will require a balanced approach with cognitive awareness and ethical reflection — synthesizing intuitive and algorithmic thinking — encompassing short-term profit and longer-term envisioning, and aiming to optimize created and captured value for shareholders while taking the concerns of those who have a real stake in the organization seriously. If business is about creating and sharing value in a future that is both 'digital' and 'relational', then innovative technologies like AI will play an increasingly important role. Consequently, mindful executives and their responsible boards therefore need to acknowledge the limitations of AI in business — especially when the uncertain future is estimated to be rather volatile or ambiguous than stable.

Contents:

• Prologue: Wising Up Amidst a Turbulent Future

• The Future Is 'Relational': Making Wise Decisions in the Boardroom:

  • Why Governing Business 'Relations' Is on the Board's Radar Today?
  • From Smart to Wise Decision-Making
  • Why Shareholders' Primacy Is Under Scrutiny Today?
  • Why Is Expanding Space- and Time-Vector Necessary?
  • Wising Up: Harmonizing Different Intelligence Perspectives?
  • How to Understand the Thick Notion of 'Wising Up'?

• The Future Is Digital: Smart Decisions in an Era of Artificial Intelligence:

  • A Digital Future: AI Contributing to Create Value in an 'Industry 4.0'
  • The Potential Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Business
  • Datafication of Our Economy
  • The Darker Side of Artificial Intelligence
  • Surveillance in Exchange for Convenience? Data Governance?
  • Ethics Legitimizing Artificial Intelligence?

• Learning: Artificial Intelligence Versus Human Intelligence:

  • Inside the CEO's Brain
  • Why Human Learning Is Superior to Machine Learning?
  • Learning: Multifaceted Intelligence and Consciousness
  • Moral Community Versus Amoral Artificial Intelligence
  • The Ethical Brain
  • Mindfulness and Wise Decision-Making

• Artificial Intelligence as a New Delphi Oracle in Uncertain Times?:

  • Is Artificial Intelligence Replacing Human Jobs?
  • 'Singularity': Progressing Science or Science Fiction?
  • The Myth of Conscious Machines
  • What Sensible Collaboration Between Humans and AI Machines?
  • The Geopolitical 'Battle' for AI Supremacy
  • A New Geopolitical Order with AI as Defining Lines

• Making Wiser Decisions: Through Paradoxal and Algo-Tuitional Thinking:

  • How to Optimize a Paradoxal Mindset?
  • 'Dialectic' Dialogues in a Business Context
  • Is Intuition or Heuristics Useful in an Ambiguous Volatile World?
  • Algorithmic Intelligence Predicting Under Stable Uncertainty
  • About Foxes and Superforecasters (in the Socio-Ethical Sphere)
  • Entanglement of Smart and Wise Decision-Making

• Epilogue: Conscious and Mindful Leadership Making Wise(r) Decisions in a Smart World

Readership: Corporate leaders, academics, students, and anyone interested in topics related to artificial intelligence and a smarter world.
Key Features:

• First book that presents an integrated view on benefits and limitations of artificial intelligence (AI) in a corporate world, and how it relates to the distinction of objective descriptive phenomena versus subjective experiences and prescriptive/normative thinking where AI may help us humans to become smarter but not wiser