Our ability to create

The history of decision making

Everyday more and more of our life decisions are being automated by computers. Incredibly complex algorithms with vast amount of variables can be filtered down and processed in seconds; however there is still many decisions that computers are not able to make. Decision making is a human trait that we have delegated to machines, and in order for us to empower our machines ability to make decisions we must understand fundamentally what decision making is.

Decision making is the process of producing outputs in response to inputs by executing an intentional procedure. This is essentially what we do as humans on a day to day basis. We get the feeling of being thirsty (input) so we get up, walk to the kitchen pour a glass of water and take a drink (intentional procedure) until we are no longer thirsty (output), usually our outputs will be the inputs into the next decisions we make. If we are done drinking we may then need to use the bathroom, an example of inputs becoming the next outputs.

Transmission

As humans our ability to make internal decisions is incredibly fast, we have a wide range of senses, emotions, and thoughts that create our inputs and define our intentional procedures. Internally within our own minds these decision making procedures can happen in seconds because we have access to infrastructure that allows incredibly fast transmission speed and high levels of information density.

decision making

Data has infiltrated every aspect of human life and has become the most speculative commodity of the 21st century. Until recently it required an incredible amount of hardware and financial resources in order to organize, process, secure and deploy data. Partially due to Moore's Law, and the recent advancements of computer hardware, software infrastructure and cloud computing, globally-scaled data management systems can be created using Open Source tools with an astonishingly short amount of time and surprisingly low costs.

Every two years the transmission speed and density of data doubles, the challenge is improving our ability to make decisions so that we can take full advantage of the infrastructure improvements. Decision making is the process of producing outputs in response to inputs by executing an intentional procedure. This is essentially what we do as humans on a day to day basis. We get the feeling of being thirsty (input) so we get up, walk to the kitchen pour a glass of water and take a drink (intentional procedure) until we are no longer thirsty (output), usually our outputs will be the inputs into the next decisions we make. If we are done drinking we may then need to use the bathroom, an example of inputs becoming the next outputs.