Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Judgment? Delegated Judgment Structures in Human–AI Relations

Artificial intelligence technologies are rapidly being integrated into decision-makingprocesses across various domains of contemporary society, including finance, medicine,administration, and transportation. This transformation raises a fundamental question: can artificial intelligence fully replace human judgment? This study re-examinesthe conventional framing of this issue as a simple problem of replacement and arguesthat the phenomenon emerging in contemporary society is better understood as theformation of a new decision-making structure between humans and artificial intelligence.Previous studies have examined ethical issues of artificial intelligence, the influenceof algorithms on social structures, and the cognitive characteristics of human judgment. However, relatively little philosophical attention has been given to the structuraltransformation that occurs when humans delegate parts of their judgment process toartificial intelligence systems and interpret the resulting outputs in order to reach finaldecisions. In many real-world environments, humans and artificial intelligence do notoperate in simple competitive or replacement relations. Instead, increasingly hybriddecision structures are emerging in which different forms of judgment are combined.Humanjudgment is a complex process involving experience, contextual understanding, meaning interpretation, and responsibility. Humans interpret social situationsand meaning structures before determining action. By contrast, artificial intelligencesystems primarily operate through large-scale data analysis, pattern recognition, andprobabilistic prediction. While AI systems can process vast datasets rapidly and estimate the likelihood of outcomes, their operations do not reproduce the interpretiveand responsibility-oriented structure characteristic of human judgment.1Based on these differences, this paper introduces the concept of a Delegated Judgment Structure in order to explain contemporary decision-making processes. In thisstructure, humans do not directly perform every stage of decision-making but delegateportions of data analysis and prediction to artificial intelligence systems while retaining the role of interpretation and final judgment. Artificial intelligence thus does notreplace human judgment but functions as a technological component that reorganizesthe overall structure of judgment.The central issue in the age of artificial intelligence is therefore not whether machines replace human beings, but how new judgment structures emerge between humans and AI systems. This study analyzes the structural differences between humanjudgment and artificial intelligence systems and explores how these systems combineto form delegated and relational judgment structures. Ultimately, the paper proposesthat decision-making in the age of artificial intelligence should be understood as a newcooperative paradigm between human interpretation and machine analysis, offering aconceptual framework for human–AI decision systems.