AI Should Think With Us, Not For Us: Coty Gonzalez on Human Decision-Making
In this episode of The Smarter Campus Podcast, Zach sits down with Dr. Cleotilde “Coty” Gonzalez, Research Professor of Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, founding director of the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, and Research Co-Director of the NSF National AI Institute for Societal Decision Making.
Drawing on more than two decades of work across cognitive science, decision-making, and artificial intelligence, Coty explores an important distinction between machine AI and Cognitive AI. Rather than simply recognizing patterns across massive datasets, Cognitive AI seeks to model how humans actually learn from experience, adapt to uncertainty, and make decisions in changing environments.
The conversation dives into human-AI teaming, automation bias, cognitive offloading, and the idea of complementary intelligence—designing AI to strengthen human judgment rather than replace it. Coty also explains why these questions become especially important when AI is involved in high-stakes decisions ranging from emergency response to public health.
For educators and higher education leaders, the conversation raises an essential question: as AI becomes more capable, how do we make sure students continue developing their own ability to think, question, evaluate, and make decisions?
