Think about some of the most important decisions people make – who to hire for a job, which kind of treatment to give a cancer patient, how much jail time to give a criminal. James Scott says we humans are pretty lousy at making them.

“I think there is room for machines to come into those realms and improve the state of our decisions,” said Scott. “That's going to involve humans and machines working together, however, not simply treating these decisions the way you might treat a microwave oven just by punching in some numbers and walking away …”

Maybe machines can help us make better decisions. But ultimately, it boils down to the question: can we build machines that are less biased than we are?

What do you think?

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About Point of Discovery

Point of Discovery is a production of the University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences. You can listen to all our episodes at @point-of-discovery .