New paper 'Guiltless Machines': why people expect more from machines than humans
joshgans · x · 2026-10-07
Economist Joshua Gans released a new paper, "Guiltless Machines," tackling a counterintuitive question: why do people expect more from machines than from people?
His argument: humans can feel guilt, and that feeling motivates them to fix things when something goes wrong. Machines feel no guilt and won't proactively correct mistakes. As a result, people demand higher reliability from machines than from humans — there's no remorseful party to make amends when the machine fails. Gans also shared a short video explaining the paper.
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