Seminar: The psychological and organizational implications of autonomy-mediated interaction

Jonathan Gratch, University of Southern California (USC)

The psychological and organizational implications of autonomy-mediated interaction

Delegating tasks to autonomous machines and using them to mediate work interactions can offer many benefits, but at what cost? In human organizations, delegating tasks to others increases moral distance from the consequences of one's actions, but it is unclear whether this and related effects will carry over when delegating to machines. Will operating through an autonomous robot further undermine trust, increase risk-taking, reduce vigilance to threats and increase dehumanization of others? Or might it soften or even reverse these effects? What are the implications for power dynamics between humans when inserting autonomous machine representatives into the organizational chain of command? What methods of accountability are most effective when some decision-makers are machines? Jonathan Gratch and his team present a series of studies that provide insight into these questions across a variety of domains including automated negotiators, algorithmic management and social dilemmas.

Jonathan Gratch is a Research Full Professor of Computer Science. Psychology and Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California (USC) and Director for Virtual Human Research at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1995. Dr. Gratch’s research focuses on computational models of human cognitive and social processes, especially emotion, and explores these models’ role advancing psychological theory and in shaping human-machine interaction. He is the founding Editor-inChief of IEEE’s Transactions on Affective Computing, founding Associate Editor of Affective Science, Associate Editor of Emotion Review and the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing. He is an AAAI Fellow, a Cognitive Science Fellow and SIGART Autonomous Agent’s Award recipient.