Trimodal Thinking for Architecting Human-Centric AI Systems: Fast, Slow, and Control

There is a significant interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for automating decision-making. While there are several AI technology solutions to choose from, there is a need to understand the fundamentals of human decision-making and conceptualization of the required AI system architecture. However, the challenge is: how can a human-centric AI system be conceptualized and designed to mimic human decision-making? This paper proposes trimodal thinking for conceptualizing and architecting human-centric AI systems. This paper reviews dual system thinking approach, fast and slow, from the well-known book, published by Daniel Kahneman, with a specific purpose to conceptualize the human-centric AI system architecture. This review found that the fast (intuitive) system 1, and slow (rational) system 2 are useful for conceptualizing the design of the AI system architecture. However, there is a need for system 3 to adjust, balance, connect, regulate and switch the control between these two systems. System 3 is critical for mitigating system 1 unconscious and system 2 conscious biases, power imbalance and noise. Relevant concepts, from principal-agent theory, homeostasis, control theory, and the atomic human, were also used to guide the proposal of trimodal thinking. Thus, this paper proposed trimodal thinking and demonstrated its use for architecting human-centric AI systems using the combination of (1) fast (intuitive), (2) slow (rational) and (3) control systems. This paper also highlighted several implications for broader enterprise architecture discipline and indicated new topics across decision science and computer science areas for further research. It is anticipated that this work will provide a necessary foundation for conceptualizing technology agnostic and human-centric AI systems architecture. This will support the complex AI system explainability and transparency needs of non-technical users and technical AI system engineers.