The explosion of artificial intelligence is making people rethink what makes us unique. Call it the AI ​​effect.

Artificial intelligence has made impressive leaps in the last year. Algorithms are now doing things, like designing drugs, writing wedding vows, negotiating deals, creating artwork, composing music, that have always been the sole prerogative of humans.
There has been a lot of furious speculation about the economic implications of all this. (AI will make us wildly productive! AI will steal our jobs!) However, the advent of sophisticated AI raises another big question that has received far less attention: How does this change our sense of what it means to be human? ? Faced with ever smarter machines, are we still… well, special?
“Humanity has always seen itself as unique in the universe,” says Benoît Monin, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Business School. “When the contrast was with animals, we pointed to our use of language, reason, and logic as defining traits. So what happens when the phone in your pocket is suddenly better than you at these things?”
Monin and Erik SantoroOpen in a new window, then a doctoral candidate in social psychology at Stanford, started talking about this a few years ago, when a program called AlphaGo was beating the world’s best players at the complex strategy game Go. What intrigued them was how people reacted to the news.

“We noticed that when discussing these milestones, people often seemed defensive,” says Santoro, who earned his Ph.D. this spring and will soon begin a postdoc at Columbia University. “The talk would gravitate towards what the AI couldn’t do yet, like we wanted to make sure nothing had really changed.”
And with each new breakthrough, Monin adds, came the refrain: “Oh, that’s not real intelligence, that’s just mimicry and pattern matching,” ignoring the fact that humans also learn by imitation, and we have our own share of heuristics. flaws, biases, and shortcuts that fall far short of objective reasoning.
This suggested that if humans felt threatened by new technologies, it was about more than just the safety of their paychecks. Perhaps people were anxious about something more deeply personal: their sense of identity and their relevance in the grand scheme of things.

 

The rise of the machines

There is a well-established model in psychology called social identity theory. The idea is that humans identify with a chosen group and define themselves in contrast to outgroups. It is that deeply ingrained us vs. them instinct that drives so much social conflict.
“We thought, maybe AI is a new benchmark group,” Monin says, “especially since it’s portrayed as having human-like traits.” He and Santoro wondered: If people’s sense of uniqueness is threatened, will they try to distinguish themselves from their new rivals by changing their criteria of what it means to be human—in effect, moving the goal posts?
To find out, Santoro and Monin put together a list of 20 human attributes, 10 of which we currently share with AI. The other 10 were traits that they felt were distinctive to humans.

 

Human attributes shared with AI

• Calculate
• Use of language
• Development standards
• Forecast of the future
• Use of logic
• Communicating
• Recognize faces
• Remember things
• Temperature detection
• Sound detection

 

AI distinctive human attributes:

• Have culture
• Maintain beliefs
• Have a sense of humor
• Be moral
• Be spiritual
• Have desires
• Feeling happy
• Feel love
• Have a personality
• Have relationships

They polled 200 people on how capable they thought humans and AI were at each trait. Respondents rated humans most capable on all 20 traits, but the gap was small on shared traits and quite large on distinctive ones, as expected.
Now for the main test: The researchers divided about 800 people into two groups. Half read an article titled “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution,” while a control group read an article about the remarkable attributes of trees. Then, going back to the list of 20 human attributes, test subjects were asked to rate “how essential” each one is to being human.
Indeed, people reading about AI rated distinctively human attributes like personality, morality, and relationships as more essential than those who read about trees. In the face of advances in AI, people’s sense of human nature has been reduced to emphasize traits that machines do not have. Monin and Santoro called this the AI Effect.

 

Human Resources

To rule out other explanations, they performed several more experiments. In one, participants were simply told that the AI was getting better. “Same result,” says Monin. “Every time we mentioned advances in AI, we got this increase in the importance of distinctive human attributes.”
Surprisingly, the participants did not downplay traits shared by humans and AI, as the researchers had predicted they would. “So even if humans aren’t the best at logic anymore, they didn’t say that logic is any less central to human nature,” Santoro notes.
Of course, artificial intelligence isn’t exactly like an invading tribe with foreign manners; after all, we created it to be like us. (Neural networks, for example, are inspired by the architecture of the human brain.) But there’s an irony here: the cognitive abilities and ingenuity that made AI possible are now the realm in which machines are outpacing us. And as the present research findings suggest, that may lead us to place more value on other traits.
It’s also worth noting that those cognitive skills still command high status and salary. Could that change if soft skills like warmth and empathy, the ability to nurture growth in others, are valued more? Will lawyers and quants be paid less, while teachers and carers receive more respect and money?
“That’s certainly one possible implication of our work,” Monin says. “There are a lot of skills that will not only not be taken over by AI, but people will increasingly value. In a world of ubiquitous and capable AI, soft skills will likely be increasingly sought after by employers” .
In the meantime, he says to her, the effect of the AI is likely to be growing. “Since we conducted this research, the real world has surpassed anything we could have imagined. There has been a constant barrage of information about new achievements in AI. So everything we saw in our little version in the lab is probably already happening to a much broader scale in society.