Would you prefer AI to make major life decisions for you? Study suggests yes — but you'd be much happier if humans did

Most people prefer artificial intelligence (AI) — not humans — to make major decisions around the distribution of financial resources, despite being happier when humans make such decisions.

The majority (64%) of participants in a new study published June 20 in the journal Public Choice favored algorithms over people when it came to deciding how much money they earned for completing a set of specific tasks.

When playing the game, participants were motivated not just by their own interests, the scientists said, but ideals about fairness. They tolerated any deviation between the decision and their own interests when the AI made the decision, so long as one fairness principle was followed — but when the decision didn’t align with common principles of fairness, they reacted very negatively.

Despite preferring AI decision-making in general over human counterparts, the participants were generally happier with the decisions that people made over AI agents. Curiously, it didn't matter how "fair" or "correct" the decision itself was.

The study found that people are open to the idea of AI making decisions thanks to a perceived lack of bias, ability to explain decisions and high performance. Whether or not AI systems actually reflect those assertions was irrelevant. Wolfgang Luhan, professor of behavioural economics at the U.K's University of Portsmouth, called the transparency and accountability of algorithms in moral decision-making contexts "vital."

Because fairness is a social construct where individual concepts are embedded in a shared set of definitions, the researchers said people would conclude that algorithms — trained on large amounts of 'fairness' data — would be a better representation of what is fair than a human decision maker.

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