Rational decision making in its linguistic description means making logical decisions. In essence, a rational agent optimally processes all relevant information to achieve its goal. Rationality has two elements and these are the use of relevant information and the efficient processing of such information. In reality, relevant information is incomplete, imperfect and the processing engine, which is a brain for humans, is suboptimal. Humans are risk averse rather than utility maximizers. In the real world, problems are predominantly non-convex and this makes the idea of rational decision-making fundamentally unachievable and Herbert Simon called this bounded rationality. There is a trade-off between the amount of information used for decision-making and the complexity of the decision model used. This explores whether machine rationality is subjective and concludes that indeed it is.

Passengers use facial recognition scanners before boarding a British Airways flight in Orlando, Fla. Brian Naylor/NPR hide caption The use of facial scanning is becoming commonplace -- maybe you've heard of the new iPhone? At the Orlando International Airport, Britain-bound passengers -- some wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts and other Disney paraphernalia -- lined up at Gate 80 recently for the evening British Airways flight to London's Gatwick Airport. It looks like any other airport departure area, except for the two small gates with what look like small boxes on posts next to them. Those boxes are actually cameras. They were installed earlier this month by SITA, the Geneva-based company that develops information technology for the world's airlines, in conjunction with British Airways and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP.

British Airways cancelled all its flights from London's two main airports until Saturday evening after a global computer system outage caused massive delays and left planes stuck on runways. BA said there was no evidence the problem had been caused by a cyber attack. The airline said terminals at Heathrow and Gatwick had become extremely congested because of the IT failure and all BA flights scheduled before 1700 GMT had been cancelled. "Please do not come to the airports. We have experienced a major IT system failure that is causing very severe disruption to our flight operations worldwide," the airline said in a statement.