Cognitive collaboration

I have a new report out on DU PressCognitive Collaboration: Why humans and computers think better together – where a couple of coauthors and I wade into the “will AI destroy the future or create utopia” debate.

Our big point is that AI doesn’t replicate human intelligence, it replicates specific human behaviours, and the mechanisms behind these behaviours are different to those behind their human equivalents. It’s in these differences that opportunity lies, as there’s evidence that machine and human intelligence are complimentary, rather than in competition. As we say in the report “humans and machines are [both] better together”. The poster child for this is freestyle chess.

Eight years later [after Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997], it became clear that the story is considerably more interesting than “machine vanquishes man.” A competition called “freestyle chess” was held, allowing any combination of human and computer chess players to compete. The competition resulted in an upset victory that Kasparov later reflected upon:

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process. . . . Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.[ref]Garry Kasparov, “The chess master and the computer,” New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010, www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/02/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/. View in article[/ref]

So rather than thinking of AI as our enemy, we should think of it as supporting us in our failings.

We’re pretty happy with the report – so happy that we’re already working on a follow on – so wander over to DU Press and check it out.