For decades, humans have been building and modifying machine learning models to perform a variety of tasks. But while we’ve been modifying these AI models to suit our needs, the question remains: how are these AIs changing us?
A group of researchers in Canada recently sought to explore this relationship between AI and human behavior by focusing on an AI that’s close to home: the smart home system.
The results, described in a study published [recently] in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, show that smart home systems are very good at predicting human preference. However, if the smart home system was just a bit off in predicting a human’s preference, the human and AI developed misaligned behaviors. “This led to more time spent by the individual changing temperature and activities than without the smart home system—the opposite of the smart home objective,” notes Rivest.
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The researchers also explored scenarios where two humans with different preferences were in the smart home environment at the same time. In such instances, the humans actually changed the order of their tasks to minimize their time spent changing temperature.
