Making choices. The proper balance of human and machine decision making is an important part of a system's design.
Human Decision Making Is Complex
It is easy to think of automating tasks traditionally performed by people, but it is not that easy to analyze how decisions are made by an experienced, intuitive worker. If an improper analysis of human decision making is made, the wrong decision making may be placed into the machine, which can get buried in documentation that is rarely reviewed. This will become a critical issue as artificial intelligence applications proliferate. See
AI.
Algorithmic or Heuristic
From a programming point of view, decision making is performed two ways: algorithmic, a precise set of rules and conditions that never change, or heuristic, a set of rules that may change over time (self-modify) as conditions occur. Heuristic techniques are employed in AI systems.