AI can make decisions better than people do. So why don’t we trust it?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If you happen to be on a Texas highway sometime this summer, and see a 50,000-pound semi truck barreling along with nobody behind the wheel, just remember: A self-driving truck is less likely to kill someone than one driven by a human. At least that’s what Chris Urmson, chief executive of autonomous-vehicle software maker Aurora Innovation, insists.

Similar logic applies in a completely different field: legal arbitration. Bridget Mary McCormack, former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and now CEO of the American Arbitration Association, thinks her organization’s new AI Arbitrator will settle some disputes better than most humans would. Insurance companies have been doing algorithmic decision-making since before it was called artificial intelligence.

Along the way, they have been sued for bias, and had to update their way of doing business. Early on, regulators made it clear that their AI-based systems would be held to the same standards as human ones. This has forced many insurance companies to make their algorithms “explainable": They show their work, rather than hiding it in an AI black box.

Unlike many of the hype men who say we’re mere years away from chatbots that are smarter than us, the people making these decision-making systems go to great lengths to document their “thought" processes, and to limit them to areas where it can be shown they’re capable and reliable. Yet many of us still prefer the judgment of a human. “You go to a court, and a judge makes a decision, and you don’t have any way to see the way her brain worked to get to that decision," says McCormack.