Designing With Uncertainty: How AI Supercharges Probabilistic Thinking

In 2024, an Air Canada customer asked a chatbot about bereavement fares. The bot confidently gave him a refund policy that didn’t exist. The airline refused to honor it. A tribunal ruled in the customer’s favor. The bot hadn't decided anything; it had predicted an answer based on patterns in its training data. The company treated that prediction as policy.
This is the risk at the heart of designing with AI today: probabilistic systems wrapped in deterministic interfaces. The AI offer