Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business are learning how AI can be used to support teamwork rather than replace teammates.

Anita Williams Woolley is a professor of organizational behavior. She researches collective intelligence, or how well teams perform together, and how artificial intelligence could change workforce dynamics. Now, Woolley and her colleagues are helping to figure out exactly where and how AI can play a positive role.

“I’m always interested in technology that can help us become a better version of ourselves individually,” Woolley said, “but also collectively, how can we change the way we think about and structure work to be more effective?”

Woolley collaborated with technologists and others in her field to develop Collective HUman-MAchine INtelligence (COHUMAIN), a framework that seeks to understand where AI fits within the established boundaries of organizational social psychology.

The researchers behind the 2023 publication of COHUMAIN caution against treating AI like any other teammate. Instead, they see it as a partner that works under human direction, with the potential to strengthen existing capabilities or relationships. “AI agents could create the glue that is missing because of how our work environments have changed, and ultimately improve our relationships with one another,” Woolley said.

The research that makes up the COHUMAIN architecture emphasizes that while AI integration into the workplace may take shape in ways we don’t yet understand, it won’t change the fundamental principles behind organizational intelligence, and likely can’t fill in all of the same roles as humans.

For instance, while AI might be great at summarizing a meeting, it’s still up to people to sense the mood in the room or pick up on the wider context of the discussion.

Organizations have the same needs as before, including a structure that allows them to tap into each human team member’s unique expertise. Woolley said that artificial intelligence systems may best serve in “partnership” or facilitation roles rather than managerial ones, like a tool that can nudge peers to check in with each other, or provide the user with an alternate perspective..

Safety and risk

With so much collaboration happening through screens, AI tools might help teams strengthen connections between coworkers. But those same tools also raise questions about what’s being recorded and why.

“People have a lot of sensitivity, rightly so, around privacy. Often you have to give something up to get something, and that is true here,” Wooley said.

The level of risk that users feel, both socially and professionally, can change depending on how they interact with AI, according to Allen Brown, a Ph.D. student who works closely with Woolley. Brown is exploring where this tension shows up and how teams can work through it. His research focuses on how comfortable people feel taking risks or speaking up in a group.

Brown said that, in the best case, AI could help people feel more comfortable speaking up and sharing new ideas that might not be heard otherwise. “In a classroom, we can imagine someone saying, “Oh, I’m a little worried. I don’t know enough for my professor, or how my peers are going to judge my question,” or, “I think this is a good idea, but maybe it isn’t.” We don’t know until we put it out there.”

Since AI relies on a digital record that might or might not be kept permanently, one concern is that a human might not know which interactions with an AI will be used for evaluation.

“In our increasingly digitally mediated workspaces, so much of what we do is being tracked and documented,” Brown said. “There’s a digital record of things, and if I’m made aware that, ‘Oh, all of a sudden our conversation might be used for evaluation,’ we actually see this significant difference in interaction.”

Even when they thought their comments might be monitored or professionally judged, people still felt relatively secure talking to another human being. “We’re talking together. We’re working through something together, but we’re both people. There’s kind of this mutual assumption of risk,” he explained.

The study found that people felt more vulnerable when they thought an AI system was evaluating them. Brown wants to understand how AI can be used to create the opposite effect—one that builds confidence and trust.

“What are those contexts in which AI could be a partner, could be part of this conversational communicative practice within a pair of individuals at work, like a supervisor-supervisee relationship, or maybe within a team where they’re working through some topic that might have task conflict or relationship conflict?” Brown said. “How does AI help resolve the decision-making process or enhance the resolution so that people actually feel increased psychological safety?”

Creating a more trustworthy AI

At the individual level, Tepper researchers are also learning how the way in which AI explains its reasoning affects how people use and trust it. Zhaohui (Zoey) Jiang and Linda Argote are studying how people react to different kinds of AI systems—specifically, ones that explain their reasoning (transparent AI) versus ones that don’t explain how they make decisions (black box AI).

“We see a lot of people advocating for transparent AI,” Jiang said, “but our research reveals an advantage of keeping the AI a black box, especially for a high ability participant.”

One of the reasons for this, she explained, is overconfidence and distrust in skilled decision-makers.

“For a participant who is already doing a good job independently at the task, they are more prone to the well-documented tendency of AI aversion. They will penalize the AI’s mistake far more than the humans making the same mistake, including themselves,” Jiang said. “We find that this tendency is more salient if you tell them the inner workings of the AI, such as its logic or decision rules.”

People who struggle with decision-making actually improve their outcomes when using transparent AI models that show off a moderate amount of complexity in their decision-making process. “We find that telling them how the AI is thinking about this problem is actually better for less-skilled users, because they can learn from AI decision-making rules to help improve their own future independent decision-making.”

While transparency is proving to have its own use cases and benefits, Jiang said the most surprising findings are around how people perceive black box models. “When we’re not telling these participants how the model arrived at its answer, participants judge the model as the most complex. Opacity seems to inflate the sense of sophistication, whereas transparency can make the very same system seem simpler and less ‘magical,'” she said.

Both kinds of models vary in their use cases. While it isn’t yet cost‑effective to tailor an AI to each human partner, future systems may be able to self-adapt their representation to help people make better decisions, she said.

“It can be dynamic in a way that it can recognize the decision-making inefficiencies of that particular individual that it is assigned to collaborate with, and maybe tweak itself so that it can help complement and offset some of the decision-making inefficiencies.”

More Family Board Games

There are so many family board games. Here are a few more we liked.

Dorfromantik: The Duel for $25: Based on the video game Dorfromantik, which spawned a cooperative board game, this spin-off pits you against another player as you draw tiles to build a landscape and try to complete tasks along the way. With identical sets in red and blue, it’s all about who builds a better environment to satisfy their villagers and score the most points. Play time is under an hour. You could play with two teams, but it works best as a two-player game.

Hey Hey Relay for $15: This super silly dice game is a race between two teams with challenge cards prompting silly voices and physical actions before you can proceed. It’s fast and chaotic to play, but probably best for younger kids (the makers suggest 6 years and up). My kids didn’t like it much, but this could be a fun party game.

Ship Show for $29: This cooperative game casts players as stockers and shippers and challenges them to correctly ship orders by guessing the correct tiles based on clues provided by the way they have been grouped. The time limit adds pressure, and this can be fun for the right group (you need to be on the same wavelength), but we found the wait for the stockers to set up was dull for shippers, and the scoring was laborious.

Flip 7 for $21: The thrill of pushing your luck is the draw for this hybrid card game, as you hit or stick Blackjack-style, trying to get seven different face-up cards. Special action cards and modifiers mix things up, allowing for some tactical play. Suitable for three or more players aged 8 and up, it only takes 20 minutes to play.

Tension: The Top 10 Naming Game for $43: Topic cards have 10 items within a category, and the opposing team has 60 seconds to guess as many as they can. Cards are divided into two colors (easy and harder), making it easy to play with kids or adjust the difficulty on the fly. This works well with any age or team size, but be prepared for lots of shouting and laughing.

You Gotta Be Kitten Me! for $13: A simple twist on liar’s dice that focuses on bluffing and calling bluffs; I am of two minds about this game. On the one hand, the game is nothing special, but on the other, cute cats! My moggy-obsessed daughter immediately wanted to play, and we had a few laughs with outrageous bluffs on the number of glasses, hats, and bow ties on these felines.

Poetry for Neanderthals for $18: Every card has a word, and your seemingly simple task is to get your team to correctly guess it within the time limit by speaking in single syllables only. If you break the rules, the opposition can hit you with the inflatable “No” stick. Suitable for two to eight players aged 7 and up, it’s loud, silly, and usually makes everyone laugh.

Danger Danger for $10: Fast and frenetic, this simple card game for two teams is about trying to have high-scoring cards showing at the end of each round. There are no turns, you can cover the other team’s cards, and rounds are timed, but you must guess when the round will end. Super simple and very quick to play, this game can get chaotic.

That Escalated Quickly for $12: This game is quick, easy, and fun for up to eight players. Featuring scenarios such as “I have invented a new sport, what is it?” players must provide suggestions from least dangerous (1) to most dangerous (10) based on their assigned number for each round. The leader of the round has to try to get them in the correct order. It works best with witty players who know each other well.

Sounds Fishy for $20: Another fun group game from Big Potato, the challenge in Sounds Fishy is to spot fake answers. Each card poses a question, but only one of the answers you get is correct. It’s for four to 10 players, and we found it more fun but tougher with more people.

Cards Against Humanity: Family Edition for $29: You can play this party game with up to 30 players, and it will produce a fair bit of juvenile giggling and chortling. Like the adult version, there isn’t much strategy here, but finding the perfect combination to crack everyone up is satisfying.

Don’t Bother

We were not so keen on these games.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Zilence: As a group of zombie apocalypse survivors atop a skyscraper, you must choose the correct flight path to snag the resources you need, determined by cards. A tight time limit makes it tricky to pick the right routes from the tangled mess on the game board, and it can be assembled differently for replay value. But the backdrop feels incongruous, and we all agreed it wasn’t much fun to play.

Connecto: Connect different symbols on your board with a dry-erase marker based on a randomly drawn challenge card to make a picture of something (like connect the dots). The first one to guess what it’s supposed to be wins the round (some are only vaguely like what they’re meant to be). Longevity takes a hit, as there’s no fun in replaying solved puzzles.

A Game of Cat & Mouth: Incredibly simple, this dexterity game challenges you to fire rubber balls through a cat’s mouth with magnetic paws, but they end up everywhere. Games tend to be very one-sided, and my kids got bored almost immediately. It is also impossible to play with actual cats in the vicinity.

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This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fueled by unusually warm waters, Hurricane Melissa this week turned into one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. Now a new rapid attribution study suggests human-induced climate change made the deadly tropical cyclone four times more likely.

Hurricane Melissa collided with Jamaica on Tuesday, wreaking havoc across the island before tearing through nearby Haiti and Cuba. The storm, which reached Category 5, reserved for the hurricanes with the most powerful winds, has killed at least 40 people across the Caribbean so far. Now weakened to a Category 2, it continues its path toward Bermuda, where landfall is likely on Thursday night, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Early reports of the damage are cataclysmic, particularly in hardest-hit western Jamaica. Winds reaching speeds of 185 miles per hour and torrential rain flattened entire neighborhoods, decimated large swaths of agricultural lands and forced more than 25,000 people—locals and tourists alike—to seek cover in shelters or hotel ballrooms. According to the new attribution study from Imperial College London, climate change ramped up Melissa’s wind speeds by 7 percent, which increased damages by 12 percent.

Losses could add up to tens of billions of dollars, experts say.

The findings echo similar reports released earlier this week on how global warming contributed to the likelihood and severity of Hurricane Melissa. Each of the analyses add to a growing body of research showing how ocean warming from climate change is fueling the conditions necessary for stronger tropical storms.

Hurricane Melissa is “kind of a textbook example of what we expect in terms of how hurricanes respond to a warming climate,” said Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the recent analyses. “We know that the warming ocean temperatures [are] being driven almost exclusively by increasing greenhouse gases.”

The storm has disrupted every aspect of life in this part of the Caribbean.

“There’s been massive dislocation of services. We have people living in shelters across the country,” Dennis Zulu, United Nations resident coordinator in Jamaica, said in a press conference on Wednesday. “What we are seeing in preliminary assessments is a country that’s been devastated to levels never seen before.”

The Climate Connection

For the rapid attribution study, researchers at Imperial College used the peer-reviewed Imperial College Storm Model, known as IRIS, which has created a database of millions of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks that can help fill in gaps on how storms operate in the real world.

The model essentially runs simulations on the likelihood of a given storm’s wind speed—often the most damaging factor—in a pre-industrial climate versus the current climate. Applying IRIS to Hurricane Melissa is how the researchers determined that human-induced warming supercharged the cyclone’s wind speed by 7 percent.