Trusting machines versus humans. We must understand the difference.

Byline: Cesar A. Hidalgo

* Humans historically take a long time to trust the latest wave of machine technology.

* In scenarios involving physical harm, people tend to see machines as more harmful than humans performing the same actions.

* It's important we combine our interest in how machines should behave with an understanding and of how we judge them.

Recently, voting machines have been on the receiving end of controversy. And yet people's aversion of machines is nothing new.

Some 500 years ago, printing was being demonised as a satanic device. Today's equivalent - artificial intelligence - is routinely criticised as a source of unemployment and bias.

But is every bit of anger justified?

Scholars studying people's reactions to machines are beginning to learn when and why we judge humans and machines differently.

Imagine a car that swerves to avoid a falling tree, and in doing so runs over a pedestrian. Do people judge this action differently if they believe it was the action of a self-driving car as opposed to that of a human?

In my latest book, How Humans Judge Machines, my co-authors and I asked over 6,000 Americans to react to scenarios just like this one, using the setup of a clinical trial.

Half of our subjects saw only scenarios involving human actions, while the other half evaluated only scenarios involving the actions of machines. This allowed us to explore when and why people judge humans and machines differently.

Bad machine, good human

In the aforementioned car accident people judge the action of the self-driving car as more harmful and immoral, even though the action performed by the human was exactly the same.

In another scenario we consider an emergency response system reacting to a tsunami. Some people were told that the town was successfully evacuated. Others were told that the evacuation effort failed.

Our results showed that in this case machines also got the short end of the stick. In fact, if the rescue effort failed, people evaluated the action of the machine negatively and that of the human positively.

The data showed that people rated the action of the machine as significantly more harmful and less moral, and also reported wanting to hire the human, but not the machine.

Do machines always get the shortest straw?

For a long time, scholars have known that people have an aversion to algorithms. Even when algorithms are better at forecasting than humans, people tend to choose human forecasters. This phenomenon is known...