David Brooks writes:

As we learn to think more and more highly of the bots, I suspect we will learn to think less and less highly of our fellow humans. Over the past few years, Hye-young Kim and Ann L. McGill have been studying what happens when people attribute human traits to AI. As people do this, Kim and McGill have found, they are more likely to dehumanize their fellow humans. For example, they are more likely to approve of company policies that would make life worse for service workers—taking away regular meals, forcing them to live in tiny dorm rooms.

The mechanism seems to be this: When AI becomes more and more humanlike, people perceive the boundary between humans and machines as less distinct, and their judgments of the two move closer together. Because even highly humanlike AI is still seen as less fully human than an actual person, this can pull people’s judgments of other humans downward: as their perception of the machine’s humanness goes up, their perception of other people’s humanness goes down.

This is exactly the point that [Anil] Seth, the neuroscientist, made separately: “If we confuse ourselves too readily with our machine creations, we not only overestimate them, we also underestimate ourselves.” [Continue reading…]