Human Cooperation When Acting Through Autonomous Machines
Recent times have seen an emergence of intelligent machines that act autonomously on our behalf, such as autonomous vehicles. Despite promises of increased efficiency, it is not clear whether this paradigm shift will change how we decide when our self-interest (e.g., comfort) is pitted against the c...
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Published in | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 116; no. 9; pp. 3482 - 3487 |
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Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
National Academy of Sciences
26.02.2019
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Recent times have seen an emergence of intelligent machines that act autonomously on our behalf, such as autonomous vehicles. Despite promises of increased efficiency, it is not clear whether this paradigm shift will change how we decide when our self-interest (e.g., comfort) is pitted against the collective interest (e.g., environment). Here we show that acting through machines changes the way people solve these social dilemmas and we present experimental evidence showing that participants program their autonomous vehicles to act more cooperatively than if they were driving themselves. We show that this happens because programming causes selfish short-term rewards to become less salient, leading to considerations of broader societal goals. We also show that the programmed behavior is influenced by past experience. Finally, we report evidence that the effect generalizes beyond the domain of autonomous vehicles. We discuss implications for designing autonomous machines that contribute to a more cooperative society. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Author contributions: C.M.d.M., S.M., and J.G. designed research; C.M.d.M. performed research; C.M.d.M., S.M., and J.G. analyzed data; and C.M.d.M., S.M., and J.G. wrote the paper. Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved January 7, 2019 (received for review October 15, 2018) |
ISSN: | 0027-8424 1091-6490 |
DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.1817656116 |