Where Human Intelligence and Machine Intelligence Meet
Last Updated on Sunday, 1 February 2009 12:55 Written by admin Sunday, 1 February 2009 12:55
Kudos to Kevin Kelly, one of the co-founders of Wired magazine, for finding a way to describe, with elegant simplicity, the future of man and machine. Outstanding work, Kevin.
Here’s a snippet from his post at The Technium:
One strand of massive connectionism is currently called social media. The goal is to connect everybody to everybody else in as many different arrangements as possible. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Yahoo Answers – the whole 10,000 strong universe of Web 2.0 sites employ various webs of humans to accomplish new things. In this regime, humans are the nodes. They generate the signals.
The other strand of massive connectionism relies on a massive number of machines, CPUs and computer transistors linked together in as many ways as possible to get things done. For example, gigantic server farms, data centers, and telecommunication networks. At the extreme level we’d have to include the mega-network of the One Machine consisting of all cell phones, PDAs, PCs, routers, wi-fi spots, satellite links, and so on. On this side, the signals at each node are generated by machines.
Very interesting. Another, complimentary approach might be to think of the future as not AI, but rather IA– Intelligence Augmentation, where the role of the computer is in fact to make the human smarter: Human Computer Symbiosis. The promise of AI hasn’t yet been realized, but the power of IA has delivered tangible benefits to humanity consistently.