How will superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) affect human decision making? And what will be the mechanisms behind this effect? We address these questions in a domain where AI already exceeds human performance, analyzing more than 5.8 million move decisions made by professional Go players over the past 71 years (1950-2021). To address the first question, we use a superhuman AI program to estimate the quality of human decisions across time, generating 58 billion counterfactual game patterns and comparing the win rates of actual human decisions with those of counterfactual AI decisions. We find that humans began to make significantly better decisions following the advent of superhuman AI. We then examine human players' strategies across time and find that novel decisions (i.e., previously unobserved moves) occurred more frequently and became associated with higher decision quality after the advent of superhuman AI. Our findings suggest that the development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies and induced them to explore novel moves, which in turn may have improved their decision-making.

翻译：超级人工智能将如何影响人类决策？其背后的机制是什么？我们在人工智能已超越人类表现的领域探索这些问题，分析了过去71年间（1950-2021年）职业围棋选手做出的超过580万次落子决策。针对第一个问题，我们使用超人类AI程序评估人类决策随时间推移的质量，生成了580亿个反事实对弈模式，将人类实际决策的胜率与反事实AI决策的胜率进行比较。研究发现，自超人类AI出现后，人类开始做出显著更优的决策。随后，我们考察了人类选手随时间变化的策略，发现新颖决策（即此前未观察到的落子）的出现频率增加，并且在超人类AI出现后与更高的决策质量相关联。我们的研究结果表明，超人类AI程序的发展可能促使人类选手突破传统策略，引导他们探索新颖落子，这进而可能改善了他们的决策能力。