The arrival of fully automated self-driving cars suggests a shift from us merely using intelligent machines—like Google Translate or ChatGPT—to actively interacting with them. The key difference? In busy traffic, our interests won’t always align with those of the self-driving cars we encounter. Mi3 assistant professor Jurgis Karpus, who co-authored a recent article on the topic, explains more.
Imagine an automated delivery vehicle rushing to complete a grocery drop-off while you’re hurrying to meet friends for a long-awaited dinner. At a busy intersection, you both arrive at the same time. Do you slow down to give it space as it manoeuvres around a corner? Or do you expect it to stop and let you pass, even if normal traffic etiquette suggests it should go first?
As self-driving technology becomes a reality, these everyday encounters will define how we share the road with intelligent machines.
Behavioral game theorists study social interactions in lab settings to understand people’s willingness to cooperate or exploit others. Recently, researchers from LMU Munich and Waseda University in Tokyo found that people are far more likely to take advantage of cooperative artificial agents than of similarly cooperative fellow humans. After all, cutting off a robot in traffic doesn’t hurt its feelings.
However, our tendency to exploit benevolent machines isn’t universal. While people in the U.S. and Europe readily take advantage of robots, people in Japan do not—or do that significantly less often. The researchers suggest this difference stems from guilt: in the West, people feel remorse when they exploit another human but they fell no guilt when exploiting a machine. In Japan, however, people experience guilt equally—whether they mistreat a person or a well-meaning robot.
These cultural differences may shape the future of automation. If people in Japan treat robots with the same respect as humans, fully autonomous taxis might take off in Tokyo long before they become the norm in Berlin, London, or New York.
Check out the original article and Jurgis Karpus’ profile and LinkedIn.
References:
Karpus, J., Shirai, R., Verba, J.T. et al. Human cooperation with artificial agents varies across countries. Sci Rep 15, 10000 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-92977-8