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：超人工智能将如何影响人类决策？这种影响背后的机制又是什么？我们在人工智能已超越人类表现的围棋领域研究这些问题，分析了过去71年间（1950-2021年）职业棋手超过580万次落子决策。针对第一个问题，我们使用超人工智能程序评估人类决策质量随时间的变化，生成了580亿个反事实对局模式，比较实际人类决策与反事实人工智能决策的胜率。研究发现，在超人工智能出现后，人类开始做出显著更优的决策。通过分析人类棋手策略随时间的变化，我们发现创新性决策（即此前未观察到的落子）出现频率更高，并且在超人工智能出现后与更高的决策质量相关。我们的研究结果表明，超人工智能程序的发展可能促使人类棋手突破传统策略，引导他们探索创新性落子，进而提升了人类决策能力。