An Uncertainty Principle for Interdependence: Laying the Theoretical Groundwork for Human-Machine Teams

The deliberateness of rational decision-making is an attempt by social scientists to improve on intuition. Rational approaches using Shannon's information theory have argued that teams and organizations should minimize interdependence (mutual information); social psychologists have long recommended the removal of the effects of interdependence to make their data iid (independent, non-orthogonal, memoryless); and the social science of interdependence is disappearing. But according to experimental evidence reported by the National Academy of Sciences, the best teams maximize interdependence. Thus, navigating social reality has so far permitted only an intuitive approach to social and psychological interdependence. Absent from these conflicting paradigms is the foundation for a theory of teams that combines rationality and interdependence based on first principles which we have begun to sketch philosophically and mathematically. Without a rational mathematics of interdependence, building human-machine teams in the future will remain intuitive, based on guesswork, and inefficient.