How Humans Judge Machines - Hardcover

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

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262045524 ISBN 13: 9780262045520

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2021

Synopsis

A detailed examination of people's reactions to machine actions as compared to human actions. Through dozens of experiments, this book explores when and why people judge humans and machines differently. 

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 tounderstanding the ethical consequences of AI.

About this title

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.

From the Back Cover

"Fascinating, provocative and growing more important each time another AI system goes live."

Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford Digital Economy Lab

"This masterful work by the brilliant scientist Cesar Hidalgo and his team explores the once-again rise of artificial intelligence, made possible by recent scientific and technological advances. How do we perceive these aliens (of our own making) in our midst? The book, replete with ingenious experiments involving engaging and realistic scenarios, is profound and farsighted. How Humans Judge Machines will be seen as a landmark on our road to the new frontier of thinking machines."

Nicholas Christakis, Yale University

"How humans can work and coexist with AI and control its various applications, some of them threatening our freedoms, jobs and security, is one of the existential questions of our age. To make progress on this question, we need to understand how humans interact with smart machines, and when they can recognize their contributions and the dangers they pose. This delightful book makes important progress on this question by collecting and presenting invaluable data on how people judge machines. A must-read for everybody who wishes to understand the future of AI in our society."

Daron Acemoglu, MIT

"César Hidalgo has long been on the forefront of the quest to understand the interaction between human society and machine learning. In this fascinating book, he asks not how machines learn about us, but about how we judge machines. This question is both fascinating social science, but increasingly important in a world in which machines are increasingly used for tasks as varying as driving vehicles or determining financial compensation. For example, the policy choices that we will make about autonomous vehicles will be shaped closely by how humans judge machines. Cesar has crafted a book that is fascinating, deeply provocative and highly relevant for the mid-21st century."
Edward Glaeser, Harvard University

"Not many people have done world-class research and also won (not one but three) Webbys for data visualization. So everything Cesar writes gets you thinking differently. But when he has written something on a topic that will define our future -- how humans and algorithms interact -- and one where he has a perspective almost no one else can, it is a must read."

Sendhil Mullainathan, University of Chicago

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262045524
• ISBN 13: 9780262045520
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256