Robots and AI May Cause Humans to Become Dangerously Lazy

From AI chatbots that help developers with coding, to the robotic arms assisting with packing your Amazon orders, the bots are becoming more and more commonplace in many different jobs. While this type of automation promises to make us more efficient (and cut down on the pesky costs of hiring actual humans), a new study suggests that it might actually be posing a danger too—though probably not in the way you think.

Researchers from the Technical University of Berlin in Germany published a paper Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI which found evidence that working alongside robots might make humans much lazier in their own work. This technology could even result in unintentional carelessness and a decline in work quality—opening the doors to potential safety issues as well.

“Teamwork is a mixed blessing,” first author Dietlind Helene Cymek, a human factors researcher at TU Berlin, said in a statement. “Working together can motivate people to perform well but it can also lead to a loss of motivation because the individual contribution is not as visible. We were interested in whether we could also find such motivational effects when the team partner is a robot.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.