How To Become A Centaur (by @ncasenmare)

 AIs are best at choosing answers. Humans are best at choosing questions.
via @mit_jods How To Become A Centaur by Nicky Case

…we’ve told ourselves that our relationship between ourselves and our AI is like a chess game: 

Zero-sum — one player’s win is another player’s loss.

…
They invited all kinds of contestants — supercomputers, human grandmasters, mixed teams of humans and AIs — to compete for a grand prize.²

Not surprisingly, a Human+AI Centaur beats the solo human. But — amazingly — a Human+AI Centaur also beats the solo computer.

This is because, contrary to unscientific internet IQ tests on clickbait websites, intelligence is not a single dimension. (The “g factor”, also known as “general intelligence”, only accounts for 30-50% of an individual’s performance on different cognitive tasks.³ So while it is an important dimension, it’s not the only dimension.) For example, human grandmasters are good at long-term chess strategy, but poor at seeing ahead for millions of possible moves — while the reverse is true for chess-playing AIs. And because humans & AIs are strong on different dimensions, together, as a centaur, they can beat out solo humans and computers alike.

…
Now, 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?

And it’s simple: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

The rest of this essay will be about AI’s forgotten cousin, IA: Intelligence Augmentation. The old story of AI is about human brains working against silicon brains. The new story of IA will be about human brains working with silicon brains. As it turns out, most of the world is the opposite of a chess game:

Non-zero-sum — both players can win.

…I’ll show how humans are already working with AIs in various fields, from art to engineering. And finally, I’ll give some rough ideas on how you can design a good partnership with an AI — how to become a centaur. 

Together, humans and AI can go from “checkmate”, to “teammate”.

Over the next few decades, the wonders in The Mother of All Demos slowly reached the public. The personal computer gave ordinary people the power of computing, something only governments and big corporations could afford previously. A particle physics lab in Switzerland released a little thing called the “World Wide Web”, which let people share knowledge using things called “web pages”, and people could even create connections between pieces of knowledge using something called a “hyperlink”.

Steve Jobs once called the computer a bicycle for the mind. Note the metaphor of a bicycle, instead of a something like a car —a bicycle lets you go faster than the human body ever can, and yet, unlike the car, the bicycle is human-powered. (Also, the bicycle is healthier for you.) The strength of metal, with a human at its heart. A collaboration — a centaur.

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. Forget AI not sharing our values — even non-AI technology stopped supporting our values, and in some cases, actively subverts them.⁷

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

…

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

It’s the “+”.

…

Human nature, for better or worse, doesn’t change much from millennia to millennia. If you want to see the strengths that are unique and universal to all humans, don’t look at the world-famous award-winners — look at children. Children, even at a young age, are already proficient at: intuition, analogy, creativity, empathy, social skills. Some may scoff at these for being “soft skills”, but the fact that we can make an AI that plays chess but not hold a normal five-minute conversation, is proof that these skills only seem “soft” to us because evolution’s already put in the 3.5 billion years of hard work for us.

And if you want to see the weaknesses of humans, go to school. This is the stuff that’s hard for human intelligences, and requires years of training to gain even a basic competency: arithmetic, computation, memory, logic, numeracy. Note that these are all things your phone can do better and faster than the smartest human alive. (And we wonder why kids feel school is meaningless…)

AIs choose answers. Humans choose questions. And given all the possibilities, the promises and pitfalls of technology in the coming decades, the next question for us humans to choose is:

What’s next?

Meanwhile, the story of IA has been one of a tragic fall. Starting out strong with Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, the idea of IA has slowly been forgotten, as technology shifted from tools for creation and more towards tools for consumption. Someone stole the wheels off the bicycle for our mind.

But now, these two story threads may be starting to wrap together, forming a new braid in history: AIA — Artificial Intelligence Augmentation.⁸ IA can give AI the human partnership it needs in order to remain aligned with our deepest goals and values. And in return, AI can give IA some new replacement wheels for the bicycle of our mind.

I’d like to tell you what the future holds. But if you tell someone something good is inevitable, it can cause self-defeating complacency — and if you tell someone something bad is inevitable, it can cause self-fulfilling despair.

Besides, answers are for AIs. As a human, you deserve questions.

Symbiosis shows us you can have fruitful collaborations even if you have different skills, or different goals, or are even different species.  Symbiosis shows us that the world often isn’t zero-sum — it doesn’t have to be humans versus AI, or humans versus centaurs, or humans versus other humans. Symbiosis is two individuals succeeding together not despite, but because of, their differences. Symbiosis is the “+”. 

A new chapter in humanity’s story is beginning, and we — living together — get to write what happens next.