How Machines Help Us Cooperate

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Every day, our robots gain a little more autonomy. With every increment in artificial intelligence and self-governing technology, we reduce the workload for humans and hand over a little more of our decision-making to machines. Despite the horror stories about super-intelligent robots taking over the Earth and destroying humanity, the advantages of this progress are clear. Every time we free up human potential, it eventually gets focused on new activities that add to a nation’s productivity and quality of life.

But there may be some less obvious benefits to automated machines too. Researchers from the US Army Research Lab, Northeastern University, and University of Southern California, teamed up to investigate what self-driving cars mean for human cooperation. Society is a better place when we work together, but cooperation may require self-sacrifice. It’s not always easy to trade our personal comforts for societal gains, especially when we experience the personal costs immediately. We often tell ourselves that we’ll do better another day instead.

Do Robots Make Us Nicer?

To find out how people would make social and ethical decisions, the researchers put participants into a computer game simulating a social dilemma. They first arranged the participants into groups of four players, and sat them separately so that they could…