(2018-02-25) How To Become A Centaur

Nicky Case: How To Become A Centaur (Cyborg)

not only does pairing humans with AIs solve a technical problem — how to overcome the weaknesses of humans/AI with the strengths of AI/humans — it also solves that moral problem: how do we make sure AIs share our human goals and values?

The rest of this essay will be about AI’s forgotten cousin, IA: Intelligence Augmentation.

The Story of IA

In 1962

Douglas Engelbart was investigating how our tools shape our thoughts

he saw a way to augment the human mind.

Doug Engelbart envisioned that the computer would be a tool for intellectual and artistic creativity; now, our devices are designed less around creation, and more around consumption

We hoped for a bicycle for the mind; we got a Lazy Boy recliner for the mind.

you don’t need a direct brain-machine interface to augment our intelligence. The interface that evolution has already gifted us — eyes, ears, hands and a body — work pretty darn well

what stunned Garry was who won at the end of the tournament — not a human grandmaster with a powerful computer, but rather, a team of two amateur humans and three weak computers! The three computers were running three different chess-playing AIs, and when they disagreed on the next move, the humans “coached” the computers to investigate those moves further. As Garry put it: “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

When you create a Human+AI team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”. It isn’t even the “Human”. It’s the “+”.

how do you find the best “+” for humans and AI? How do you combine humans’ and AI’s individual strengths, to overcome their individual weaknesses?

Children, even at a young age, are already proficient at: intuition, analogy, creativity, empathy, social skills.

Computers are, obviously, best at computing

you can only train an AI if you have a “cost function”, that is, if there are quantitatively better or worse answers

AIs are best at choosing answers. Humans are best at choosing questions.

the human chooses the questions, in the form of setting goals and constraints — while the AI generates answers, usually showing multiple possibilities at once, and in real-time to the humans’ questions. But it’s not just a one-way conversation: the human can then respond to the AI’s answers, by asking deeper questions, picking and combining answers, and guiding the AI using human intuition.

think less of assimilating into The Borg, and more of a spirited conversation between Kirk & Spock — a mix of intuition and logic that surpasses either one alone.

these two story threads may be starting to wrap together, forming a new braid in history: AIA — Artificial Intelligence Augmentation.

if there’s just one idea you take away from this entire essay, let it be Mother Nature’s most under-appreciated trick: symbiosis.