Robots that predict the future.

Princeton University Press, 2026

If you ask Benjamin Richt, author of Irrational Decision Making: How We Empowered Computers to Make Choices for UsHe will likely tell you that our current dilemma has a lot to do with the idea and theory of decision theory—or what economists call rational choice theory. Recht, a polymath professor in UC Berkeley’s department of electrical engineering and computer science, prefers the term “mathematical rationality” to describe the narrow, statistical concept that fueled the desire to build computers, explained how they would eventually work, and influenced the kinds of problems they would be good at solving.

This belief system goes back to the Enlightenment, but in Recht’s words, it truly took hold at the end of World War II. Nothing focuses the mind on quick decision-making like danger and war, and mathematical models that proved especially useful in the war against the Axis powers convinced a select group of scientists and statisticians that they could also be a logical basis for designing the first computers. Thus arose the idea of ​​the computer as an ideal rational agent, a machine capable of making optimal decisions by minimizing uncertainty and maximizing utility.

Recht argues that intuition, experience, and judgment gave way to optimization, game theory, and statistical prediction. “The fundamental algorithms developed during this period drive the automated decisions of our modern world, whether it’s managing supply chains, scheduling flight times, or placing ads on your social media feeds,” he writes. In this reform-driven reality, “every life decision is presented as if it were a spin in an imaginary casino, and every argument can be reduced to costs and benefits, means and ends.”

Today, says Richt, mathematical rationality (wearing its own human skin) is best represented by pollster Nate Silver, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, and an assortment of Silicon Valley oligarchs. These are people who fundamentally believe that the world would be a better place if more of us adopted our analytical mindsets and learned to weigh costs and benefits, assess risks, and plan better. In other words, these are people who believe that we should all make decisions like computers.

How can we demonstrate that (unprovable) human intuition, ethics, and judgment are better ways of solving some of the world’s most pressing and vexing problems?

This is a ridiculous idea for a number of reasons, he says. To name just one, it’s not like humans can’t make evidence-based decisions before automation. “Advances in clean water, antibiotics, and public health reduced life expectancy from 40 years in the 1850s to 70 by the 1950s,” Recht writes. “From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, we made world-changing scientific breakthroughs in physics, including the new theories of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and relativity.” We also managed to build cars and airplanes without formal systems of rationality and somehow came up with social innovations like modern democracy that lacked a deterministic maxim.

So how do we convince the pinkers and silvers of the world that the decisions we face in life aren’t actually due to the relentless grind of mathematical rationality? Moreover, how can we demonstrate that (unverifiable) human intuition, morality, and judgment can be better ways of solving some of the world’s most pressing and vexing problems?

Doubleday, 2026

One might begin by reminding rationalists that any prediction, computational or otherwise, is really only one. desire-but with a powerful self-fulfilling tendency. This idea animates Carissa Véliz’s surprisingly wide-ranging discussion. Prophecy: Prophecy, Power, and the Fight for the Future, From Ancient Oracles to AI.

Wells, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, sees a prophecy as “a magnet that draws reality to itself.” “When the magnetic force is strong enough, the prediction tends to come true,” she writes.