How Humans Judge Machines

Abstract

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 performed by a machine or a human? How 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? 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 A.I., and whether we do it fairly or not. Through original research, they bring us one step closer to understanding the ethical consequences of artificial intelligence. How Humans Judge Machines can be read for free at https://www.judgingmachines.com/ (in print with MIT Press).