How Humans Judge Machines

by Cesar A. Hidalgo, Diana Orghian, Jordi Albo Canals, Filipa De Almeida, Natalia Martin

Overview

Explore how we judge humans and machines differently, depending on the scenario—from losing your job to AI to the failure of a natural disaster alert system.

How would you feel about losing your job to a machine? How about a tsunami alert system that fails? Would you react differently to acts of discrimination depending on whether they were carried out by a machine or by a human? What about public surveillance?

How Humans Judge Machines compares people’s reactions to actions performed by humans and machines. Using data collected in dozens of experiments, this book reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions.

Are there conditions in which we judge machines unfairly? Is our judgment of machines affected by the moral dimensions of a scenario? Is our judgment of machine correlated with demographic factors such as education or gender?

César Hidalgo and colleagues use hard science to take on these pressing technological questions. Using randomized experiments, they create revealing counterfactuals and build statistical models to explain how people judge artificial intelligence and whether they do it fairly. Through original research, How Humans Judge Machines bring us one step closer to understanding the ethical consequences of AI.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262362528
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	89 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Written by César A. Hidalgo, Director of the Center for Collective Learning at the University of Toulouse, the author of Why Information Grows, and coauthor of The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press), together with a team of social psychologists (Diana Orghian and Filipa de Almeida) and roboticists (Jordi Albo-Canals), How Humans Judge Machines presents a unique perspective on the nexus between AI and society. Anyone interested in the future of AI ethics should explore the experiments and theories in How Humans Judge Machines.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Profound and farsighted.”
—Nicholas Christakis, Yale University
 
“Fascinating, provocative, and growing more important each time another AI system goes live.”
—Erik Brynfjolfsson, Stanford Digital Economy Lab
 
“An invaluable guide to making wise choices.”
—Andrew McAfee, MIT
 
“Shines important light on this vital yet poorly understood issue.”
—Steven Pinker, Harvard University
 
“A must-read for everybody who wishes to understand the future of AI in our society.”
—Daron Acemoglu, MIT
 
“Evidence—not mere conjecture or anecdote—on human moral judgments.”
—Paul Romer, NYU, 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics
 
“Fascinating, deeply provocative and highly relevant for the mid-21st century.”
—Edward Glaeser, Harvard University
 
“A must read.”
—Sendhil Mullainathan, University of Chicago
 
“A visual and intellectual tour de force!”
—Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Northeastern University
 
 “A framework to consider when and under what circumstances we are biased against or in favor of machines.”
—Maryann Feldman, University of North Carolina
 
“Indispensable to any scholar studying the psychological aspects of AI ethics.”
—Iyad Rahwan, Max Planck Institute