The Human Edge: Smarter Decisions in the Age of AI.<\/a><\/p>\nEinhorn has spent the past several years studying how people actually use artificial intelligence, not how they claim to use it. Her conclusion: the tools have changed faster than our habits of mind have. I sat down with her to discuss what’s at stake when we get the relationship between human judgment and machine assistance wrong.<\/p>\n
Einhorn traces her framework back to the newsroom. “Journalism taught me that the first explanation is almost never the whole story,” she said. “As an investigative reporter, I learned to question assumptions, seek out missing perspectives, test evidence, and stay comfortable with uncertainty before reaching a conclusion. Business training often emphasizes frameworks for making decisions efficiently, but journalism trained me to make sure I focused on solving the right problem in the first place.” That habit, she argues, “is even more valuable in the age of AI, where answers are abundant but judgment is still a uniquely human responsibility.”<\/p>\n
That responsibility, she found, is exactly what many people are handing away. When she began studying how people used ChatGPT after its 2022 debut, she expected more questions. Instead: “I found that many people were asking it to think for them rather than with them. They weren’t just using AI to draft emails or summarize documents, they were increasingly turning to it to make decisions, define problems, and even shape their opinions.” The distinction matters, she said, because “the greatest value of AI isn’t in replacing human judgment; it’s in expanding and challenging it.”<\/p>\n
Part of the risk, Einhorn said, is mistaking confidence for correctness. “One of the biggest mistakes people make is confusing fluency with accuracy. AI is designed to produce responses that sound convincing, not to guarantee they’re true. That’s why I encourage people to treat every AI answer as a draft, not a decision.” Her checklist: “Where did this information come from? What evidence supports it? What might be missing? And what would someone who disagrees say?”<\/p>\n
There’s a subtler danger, too, in how AI learns from us over time. “The danger isn’t that AI gives us bad information. It’s that it gives us increasingly familiar information,” Einhorn said. “AI learns from our past behavior, so over time it can reinforce existing preferences, beliefs, and habits rather than expose us to new possibilities. The better it gets at predicting what we’ll like, the easier it becomes to stay inside a comfortable but narrowing view of the world.” Her advice is blunt: “Good decisions require actively seeking what we’re not seeing. The risk is not just that AI shapes our choices, but that it quietly limits the choices we ever consider.”<\/p>\n
To explain when AI helps and when it hijacks, Einhorn offers two characters: the Lamborghini driver, who surrenders every navigational choice to the machine, and the surgeon, who deploys AI only for a precise, bounded task. “Lamborghini driver mode is what happens when you aren’t yet sure where you want to end up,” she said. “AI can be a valuable, speedy, high performance car type of a thought partner, but it shouldn’t become the decision-maker because the destination itself is still being determined.” Surgeon mode is different: “You already know the decision you’re making and you use AI to extract that information quickly and efficiently before returning to your own judgment.” The most common failure, she said, is “treating a Lamborghini driver type of problem like a surgeon problem. They hand an open-ended decision to AI before they’ve clarified what matters, what success looks like, or whose interests are at stake.” Her fix: “Ask yourself first: \u2018What problem am I solving?\u2019”<\/p>\n
People often assume they have a technology problem when they actually have a thinking problem, Einhorn said, offering examples: “A manager asks AI how to improve team performance when the real issue is that expectations were never clearly communicated. An entrepreneur asks AI which strategy to pursue when the deeper question is what kind of business they want to build.” Her rule: “Only bring in an AI tool after you’ve brought your own human thinking and judgment forward. Otherwise it will give you answers based on what other people have done, which may have nothing to do with your problem and purpose.”<\/p>\n
Rigor, she said, should scale with the stakes. “A practical rule is to trust AI for generating possibilities, but verify anything that influences an important decision. Ask for sources. Check primary documents when available. Cross-reference key facts. Be especially careful when AI provides information that sounds highly specific, because confidence and accuracy are not the same thing.” Her framing: “AI is a prediction engine, not a truth engine.”<\/p>\n
Einhorn is direct about AI’s tendency to tell us what we want to hear. “AI tends to surface confirming information because that’s often what users implicitly ask for,” she said. Her countermeasure is a set of adversarial prompts: “‘What are the strongest arguments against this decision?’ ‘What would someone who completely disagrees with me say?’ ‘What evidence would make me change my mind?'” The goal, she said, isn’t “to prove you’re right, but to discover what you’re missing before reality does it for you.”<\/p>\n
Einhorn also worries about atrophy. “Just as our muscles weaken when they’re not used, certain cognitive abilities can deteriorate when they’re consistently outsourced,” she said. “What concerns me most is that these losses can be difficult to notice because AI makes us feel more productive in the moment. The work still gets done. But over time, we may become less confident in our own judgment because we’ve stopped exercising it.”<\/p>\n
Asked what she’d tell someone in a short elevator ride, Einhorn didn’t hesitate: “Use AI to improve your thinking, not replace it. Let AI do what it does best: gather information, generate options, summarize material, and challenge your assumptions. But don’t outsource the moments that require judgment. AI can tell you what is likely. It cannot tell you what matters. It cannot choose your goals, weigh your values, or decide which risks are worth taking. The people who will benefit most from AI won’t be those who use it for every decision. They’ll be the ones who know when to lean on it and when to think for themselves. And remember: the first answer is a draft, not a decision.”<\/p>\n
It’s a distinction worth sitting with the next time a chatbot answers instantly and confidently. The speed is real. So is the temptation to mistake it for wisdom. The winners of the AI era may not be those who adopt it fastest, but those who never stop asking, as Einhorn does, whether they’re solving the right problem in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For nearly a decade, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn built her career asking the questions companies didn’t want answered. As…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,501,4276,685,1635,809,1955],"class_list":["post-116078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-career","tag-job","tag-leadership","tag-performance","tag-work","tag-workplace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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