Steering AI Beyond Automation: A Research Agenda for Human-AI Collaboration

Stanford economists Gabriel Unger and Arvind Narayanan argue that AI research is overly biased toward full automation and sketch an alternative agenda centered on human-AI collaboration. They propose four research directions, including "white box agents" that reveal their intermediate processes, sources, assumptions, and uncertainties so users can interact with them directly. The essay traces the debate's history in computer science and calls for a bottom-up, market-driven approach to steering AI development.