Future of Work, Working with AI and Human Condition(ing)

Information Systems and Operations Management  (ISOM)

Speaker : Alok GUPTA

From University of Minnesota

Room : Bernard Ramanantsoa 

1 - "Will humans-in-the-loop become borgs? Merits and pitfalls of working with AI"

We analyze how advice from an AI affects complementarities between humans and AI, in particular what humans know that an AI does not know: “unique human knowledge.” In a multi-method study consisting of an analytical model, experimental studies, and a simulation study, our main finding is that human choices converge toward similar responses improving individual accuracy. However, as overall individual accuracy of the group of humans improves, the individual unique human knowledge decreases. Based on this finding, we claim that humans interacting with AI behave like “Borgs,” that is, cyborg creatures with strong individual performance but no human individuality. We argue that the loss of unique human knowledge may lead to several undesirable outcomes in a host of human–AI decision environments. We demonstrate this harmful impact on the “wisdom of crowds.” Simulation results based on our experimental data suggest that groups of humans interacting with AI are far less effective as compared to human groups without AI assistance. We suggest mitigation techniques to create environments that can provide the best of both worlds (e.g., by personalizing AI advice). We show that such interventions perform well individually as well as in wisdom of crowds settings.

2 - "Cognitive challenges in human-AI collaboration: Investigating the path towards productive delegation"

We study how humans make decisions when they collaborate with an artificial intelligence (AI) in a setting where humans and the AI perform classification tasks. Our experimental results suggest that humans and AI who work together can outperform the AI that outperforms humans when it works on its own. However, the combined performance improves only when the AI delegates work to humans but not when humans delegate work to the AI. The AI’s delegation performance improved even when it delegated to low-performing subjects; by contrast, humans did not delegate well and did not benefit from delegation to the AI. This bad delegation performance cannot be explained with some kind of algorithm aversion. On the contrary, subjects acted rationally in an internally consistent manner by trying to follow a proven delegation strategy and appeared to appreciate the AI support. However, human performance suffered as a result of a lack of metaknowledge—that is, humans were not able to assess their own capabilities correctly, which in turn led to poor delegation decisions. Lacking metaknowledge, in contrast to reluctance to use AI, is an unconscious trait. It fundamentally limits how well human decision makers can collaborate with AI and other algorithms. The results have implications for the future of work, the design of human–AI collaborative environments, and education in the digital age.