Augmented Collective Intelligence (1)
Originally published for paying Patreon members on 2017-12-14. Republished here after a 90-day patron-first period.
I'll be posting curated links about this subject periodically
Wonderfully, this post addresses three subjects I track because I know they are important: metacognition and its role in infotention, augmented collective intelligence, and the relationship of human cooperation to social media.
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/meta-collaboration-thinking-with-another-lori-desautels
The two aspects of being human that set us apart from other mammals are metacognition and the deep desire to belong or feel felt. Our sense of needing to belong to a group is an inherited part of our neurobiology, and collaboration with others is the desired outcome. Metacognition is our brains' miraculous innate ability to self-assess, think about our thinking, and reshape our perspectives.
Feeling the emotions of others, social acceptance, and cooperation are critical to our early development of the identity and industry stages. Author and motivational speaker Daniel Pink states that the future belongs to conceptual cooperative thinkers.
To further reframe: What might people be able to do together, augmented by machines, that we are not able to do (or find it too onerous or expensive to do) without artificial augmentation?
https://hbr.org/2015/06/beyond-automation
What if we were to reframe the situation? What if, rather than asking the traditional question—What tasks currently performed by humans will soon be done more cheaply and rapidly by machines?—we ask a new one: What new feats might people achieve if they had better thinking machines to assist them? Instead of seeing work as a zero-sum game with machines taking an ever greater share, we might see growing possibilities for employment. We could reframe the threat of automation as an opportunity for augmentation.
The two of us have been looking at cases in which knowledge workers collaborate with machines to do things that neither could do well on their own. And as automation makes greater incursions into their workplaces, these people respond with a surprisingly broad repertoire of moves. Conventional wisdom is that as machines threaten their livelihood, humans must invest in ever higher levels of formal education to keep ahead. In truth, as we will discuss below, smart people are taking five approaches to making their peace with smart machines.
How about using machine learning to improve the way information technologies can amplify human thinking and communication capabilities?
This essay describes a new field, emerging today out of a synthesis of AI and IA. For this field, we suggest the name artificial intelligence augmentation (AIA): the use of AI systems to help develop new methods for intelligence augmentation. This new field introduces important new fundamental questions, questions not associated to either parent field. We believe the principles and systems of AIA will be radically different to most existing systems.