How to outsmart the smart world    

The world is constantly getting smarter. Digitalization surrounds us and permeates our every activity and, while AI and machine learning bring us undoubted benefits, the runaway train of technology can also seem very threatening. How should we respond to it, and how can we cope with uncertainty in an increasingly uncertain world?

The answer, says Gerd Gigerenzer, is to become smarter ourselves. An expert on human decision-making, he argues that, if algorithms populate more and more of our environment as technology gets smarter, we need to get smarter, too. Instead of leaning back and being passive consumers of the fruits of technology, we need to think for ourselves even more. So how can we become smarter? For Gigerenzer – one of the world’s foremost experts on human decision-making – it means harnessing the power of intuition.

This not only challenges a commonly held view of intuition – namely, that it is inferior to logical rationality – but also goes against the…