The Unnoticed Cognitive Bias Secretly Shaping the AI Agenda

Written by Camylle Lanteigne (@CamLante), who's currently pursuing a Master's in Public Policy at Concordia University and whose work on social robots and empathy has been featured on Vox. This explainer was written in response to colleagues' requests to know more about temporal bias in AI ethics. It begins with a refresher on cognitive biases, then dives into: how humans understand time, time preferences, present-day preference, confidence changes, planning fallacies, and hindsight bias. Bias is a really big topic, but I'll try to succinctly define a subsection of it--implicit cognitive bias--in a way that is useful for AI ethics, particularly. Humans have cognitive biases, which means every one of us, to varying degrees, holds beliefs and impressions that are not backed up by fleshed out reasoning or evidence, or that we never bothered questioning in the first place.¹