Reliability or Ethics: Why Should the Human Decision be Initial or Final?

Decision support systems or, more recently, human-AI teaming systems vary in one way or another: Who makes the final decision when it comes to important matters or life or death? For fundamental legal, safety, moral, or human persuasion reasons, the final decision in cooperative systems is practically often assigned to humans. The article addresses the complexity of the discussion and discusses the pros and cons of a technological and of a human final decision. Especially in contexts where human behavior is known to be unreliable, the question arises whether it is appropriate to subordinate more reliable decision-makers to human decision-making. The question also arises as to how AI-based assistance and suggestion systems influence the quality and quantity of the decision favorably or unfavorably. The first results of a study on this question are presented, which replaces the ethical and moral discussion with a reliability-oriented one. This is particularly important as our everyday lives are influenced in the same way by the same issues and we have already adapted to technological solutions or, on the contrary, no longer make final decisions on our own because we also trust technological solutions.

Keywords: Human-AI teaming, Decision-making, Assistance systems, Human machine systems, Ethics vs. reliability, Study.