Humans and Machines, an Unstoppable Team – Why We’ll Still Need Human Superpowers in the Future!

And yet: We are finally returning to technology and interacting with computer-assisted agents day by day, more and more. We negotiate with them, we learn with them, they understand our needs and emotions. But to what extent do we transfer our normal social rules to human-machine interaction?

People are ahead of the pack — at least when it comes to soft skills.

Human interaction is based on trust. So strong that its effect is often underestimated. And that is exactly what we often lack about our technical counterpart.

As a result, computer agents are increasingly being equipped with anthropomorphic features and autonomous behavior to improve their problem-solving abilities and make interaction with people more natural.

This presents us with new challenges in being able to make trust-based decisions. Since trust actually only develops over time, it is difficult to say, especially when it comes to anthropomorphic computers. And do we even want a bond of trust to be established?

According to Jones and George [1], three features of interpersonal coordination in particular are important for building trust:

• Our values: They determine our basis for evaluation.
• Our attitudes: Object-specific attitudes form the basis for the experience of trust among different people.
• Our emotions: They are part of the trust experience.

All three are very human-specific features that a computer does not necessarily have. However, studies show that diverse embodiments of artificial agents have been proven to cause natural reactions in humans. How can that be?

The idea is often to equip technologies with human-like characteristics in order to build trust. Since humans evoke certain emotions, human-like facial expressions and gestures, this promotes a relationship of trust.

And advice given by computers is more rational and objective than human advice.

At least that is what the majority expects. We all have difficulties in reconciling trust in computer results with the actual reliability of the results. This is due to the automation bias, through which we write to computer-generated decision-making aids greater power and authority than other sources of advice. You should not forget that behind every programming there is only one person who is influenced by his or her values.

After all, technology serves people.

As humans, we have our own programming — we're social beings, and that's a good thing. Fortunately, in the long term, technical options will not be enough to imitate real encounters with people. Soft skills such as trust remain with people, because digital opportunities are only complementary, not replaceable.

When Miriam Mertens and I teamed up to found DeepSkill, that was exactly what was important to us. The focus should be on people and with them on interpersonal relationships. That's why it's the mix that counts. The technology will continue to develop and grow.

But I am convinced, and that is also true for the future:

Technology can do a lot of things, but we humans can do more.

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