By Alan Burdick

Artificial intelligence is gradually catching up to ours. A.I. algorithms can now consistently beat us at chess, poker and multiplayer video games, generate images of human faces indistinguishable from real ones, write news articles (not this one!) and even love stories, and drive cars better than most teenagers do.

But A.I. isn’t perfect, yet, if Woebot is any indicator. Woebot, as Karen Brown wrote this week in Science Times, is an A.I.-powered smartphone app that aims to provide low-cost counseling, using dialogue to guide users through the basic techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy. But many psychologists doubt whether an A.I. algorithm can ever express the kind of empathy required to make interpersonal therapy work.

“These apps really shortchange the essential ingredient that — mounds of evidence show — is what helps in therapy, which is the therapeutic relationship,” Linda Michaels, a Chicago-based therapist who is co-chair of the Psychotherapy Action Network, a professional group, told The Times.

Empathy, of course, is a two-way street, and we humans don’t exhibit a whole lot more of it for bots than bots do for us. Numerous studies have found that when people are placed in a situation where they can cooperate with a benevolent A.I., they are less likely to do so than if the bot were an actual person.

“There seems to be something missing regarding reciprocity,” Ophelia Deroy, a philosopher at Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich, told me. “We basically would treat a perfect stranger better than A.I.”

In a recent study, Dr. Deroy and her neuroscientist colleagues set out to understand why that is. The researchers paired human subjects with unseen partners, sometimes human and sometimes A.I.; each pair then played a series of classic economic games — Trust, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken and Stag Hunt, as well as one they created called Reciprocity — designed to gauge and reward cooperativeness.

Our lack of reciprocity toward A.I. is commonly assumed to reflect a lack of trust. It’s hyper-rational and unfeeling, after all, surely just out for itself, unlikely to cooperate, so why should we? Dr. Deroy and her colleagues reached a different and perhaps less comforting conclusion. Their study found that people were less likely to cooperate with a bot even when the bot was keen to cooperate. It’s not that we don’t trust the bot, it’s that we do: The bot is guaranteed benevolent, a capital-S sucker, so we exploit it.

That conclusion was borne out by conversations afterward with the study’s participants. “Not only did they tend to not reciprocate the cooperative intentions of the artificial agents,” Dr. Deroy said, “but when they basically betrayed the trust of the bot, they didn’t report guilt, whereas with humans they did.” She added, “You can just ignore the bot and there is no feeling that you have broken any mutual obligation.”

This could have real-world implications. When we think about A.I., we tend to think about the Alexas and Siris of our future world, with whom we might form some sort of faux-intimate relationship. But most of our interactions will be one-time, often wordless encounters. Imagine driving on the highway, and a car wants to merge in front of you. If you notice that the car is driverless, you’ll be far less likely to let it in. And if the A.I. doesn’t account for your bad behavior, an accident could ensue.

“What sustains cooperation in society at any scale is the establishment of certain norms,” Dr. Deroy said. “The social function of guilt is exactly to make people follow social norms that lead them to make compromises, to cooperate with others. And we have not evolved to have social or moral norms for non-sentient creatures and bots.”

Middlebury College Future Researchers Club’s mission is to bridge the knowledge and skill gap between students and the careers in STEM they are interested in pursuing, with an emphasis on careers in STEM research outside of clinical medicine. In doing so, Middlebury College Future Researchers Club sets its members up for success in their pre-professional journey towards graduate school and research. Through active faculty and alumni mentorship, lab shadowing opportunities, works-in-progresses, and journal club, we will enrich students’ understanding of what research entails.

About 7.31 million Americans were employed in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) occupations in 2018, an increase of 7.48% from 2014, when there were 6.80 million STEM workers. Those who are interested in joining this growing industry may have further opportunities to find jobs and save enough, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects an uptick in most STEM occupations over the next decade. According to BLS predictions, there will be 8.05 million STEM workers in 2028.

Though most STEM jobs have grown over the past years and are expected to continue that upward trend, some specific occupations have gained more ground than others. In this study, we looked at the changing landscape of STEM and uncovered the fastest-growing STEM jobs in the U.S. For details on our data sources or how we put the information together to create our findings, check out the Data and Methodology section below.

Key Findings

• Overall growth in the STEM field is slowing. Over the past four years, the number of STEM jobs in the U.S. increased by 7.48%, or an annualized rate of 1.45%. Over the coming 10 years, the BLS expects STEM jobs to increase by 10.13%, or a rate of only 1.01% every year.
• STEM jobs are shifting toward those with a computer and mathematical focus. In 2014, 53.23% of STEM jobs fell under the category of computer and mathematical occupations. That percentage grew over the four years since and is expected to continue to grow. In 2018, 54.75% of STEM jobs had a computer and mathematical focus, and the BLS predicts that this percentage will increase to 56.56% by 2028.
• Large STEM occupations can expect continued growth. Many of the occupations that rank in our list of the top 25 fastest-growing STEM jobs are already fairly large. In particular, the four largest STEM jobs in 2018 – applications software developers, computer user support specialists, computer systems analysts and systems software developers – all rank in the 10 fastest-growing STEM jobs. In 2018, each of these four occupations employed more than 400,000 workers each