Microsoft CSO Eric Horvitz on keeping humans in the driver's seat in the AI era
erichorvitz · x · 2026-10-05
Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz joins Annie Duke on the Alliance for Decision Education podcast to discuss human cognition in the AI era.
Key points
- Horvitz argues against the passive framing of an AI "takeover": governance, design, and clear values determine whether these tools sharpen human judgment or quietly erode it.
- Drawing on decades of human-AI collaboration research, he asks what we actually lose when machines can think for us.
- Takeaways include why the best AI users today are already domain experts, why nostalgia should be distinguished from genuine skill loss, and why the gap between good decisions and good outcomes matters more as uncertainty rises.
Horvitz is known for foundational work on probability and utility in ML, bounded rationality, and pioneering human-AI complementarity systems deployed in healthcare.
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