CONCEPT
Choice Engine
An AI-powered system that helps people make better decisions — as judged by their own values — by overcoming informational deficits and cognitive biases that predictably distort human judgment.
The Choice Engine is Sunstein's most ambitious application of behavioral science to AI governance. The concept designates an AI system that functions as advisor rather than decider, analyzing available options in a complex domain — health insurance, mortgages, energy providers, educational programs — and recommending the option that best serves the individual user's stated preferences and actual needs. The engine accounts for informational deficits that make consumer markets inefficient (complexity of options, opacity of pricing, difficulty of multi-dimensional comparison) and for behavioral biases that make consumers predictably poor decision-makers (present bias, status quo bias, availability heuristic). Properly designed, the Choice Engine preserves autonomy through override preservation while overcoming the informational and cognitive barriers that prevent most consumers from making choices that serve their reflective interests. Improperly designed, the same architecture becomes a manipulation engine serving the deployer rather than the user.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction between Choice Engine and manipulation engine is not a feature of the technology