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IEMS 490: Humans, AI, and Decision-making


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Description

The course is organized by level of analysis—individual, team, organization—but three overarching frameworks cut across levels, and students learn to apply them at each level:

1. The Jagged Frontier: AI capability is unevenly distributed across tasks. The frontier between what AI does well and what it does poorly is jagged, non-intuitive, and constantly shifting. At every level—individual workflow, team process, organizational system—the first diagnostic question is: Where exactly is the frontier here, and do the people involved know where it is?

2. Centaurs, Cyborgs, and Self-Automators: There are fundamentally different modes of human-AI integration. Centaurs maintain clean divisions of labor. Cyborgs deeply interleave human and AI contributions. Self-automators delegate entire roles to AI. At every level, the second diagnostic question is: What mode of integration are we using, is it the right one, and what does it demand of the humans involved?

3. Substitute, Enlarge, Reconfigure (SER): AI can replace existing processes (Substitute), expand what's possible within existing structures (Enlarge), or fundamentally transform how decisions are made—requiring complementary co-inventions in roles, relationships, and routines (Reconfigure). At every level, the third diagnostic question is: Where are we on the SER spectrum, where should we be, and what co-inventions are needed to get there?

The course's power lies in applying all three lenses simultaneously. For any human-AI decision system, students learn to ask: Do we understand the frontier? Have we chosen the right integration mode? And are we stuck in substitution when the situation calls for reconfiguration?Syllabus