The Autonomous Choice Architect

Abstract

Increasingly, the entity which is meaningfully designing the environments in which individuals make decisions and interact is not a fellow human-being, but an algorithm or artificial intelligence, powered by a stream of Big Data and infused with an objective it has been programmed to maximise. This entity I call the autonomous choice architect. In this paper, I present a conceptual discussion of the autonomous choice architect, relating this concept to nudge theory and behavioural science more broadly. I argue that choice architects, be them autonomous computational systems or human-beings, at a most basic level merely select – from a range of designs – the design with is most likely to maximise a pre-determined objective. I then proceed to argue that, given the growing demand for targeted, personalised choice architecture and for faster, dynamic reconfigurations of choice architecture, as well as the ever-expanding pool of data from which feedback can be drawn, the role of the human choice architect is increasingly redundant. To illustrate this argument, I then provide a discussion of three contemporary studies which point towards the concept of the autonomous choice architect, before concluding.