Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest buzz word in tech.
Some are fearful AI will take over human jobs, while others are embracing the technology at an unprecedented rate. Recent research by Forrester predicted AI to grow by 300 percent this year alone. In the meetings world, it’s being used, but it’s still being debated whether it could cause more stress than ease, especially if implemented without much knowledge of the technology.
Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri, however, believes that instead of worrying about how machines are becoming smarter, we should be focusing on how machines can make us smarter. With the invention of Siri came essentially a personal assistant that can help anyone with a smartphone answer the questions they need answered or set reminders they need reminded. In a recent TED Talk, Gruber shared how that can be taken a few steps further. He believes humanistic AI—the partnership between humans and AI—can achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive thinking.
One of the biggest benefits of humanistic AI could be personal memory enhancement, which could revolutionize how networking works. Imagine if you could remember every person you ever met, how you met them and several details about them. While it would certainly be beneficial to people with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, it could completely change the effectiveness of conversations at networking events. If you already remember discussions from a previous year’s meeting, those discussions can be enhanced at this year’s.
While Gruber doesn’t know yet exactly how personal memory enhancement could work, he does believe it will happen sooner than we think. This led him to leave the TED Talk audience with a final statement: “We can choose to use AI to automate and compete with us, or we can use AI to augment and collaborate with us, to overcome our cognitive limitations and to help us do what we want to do, only better. And as we discover new ways to give machines intelligence, we can distribute that intelligence to all of the AI assistants in the world, and therefore to every person, regardless of circumstance. And that is why, every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter.”
What do you think? Watch the full TED Talk here, and answer in the comments section below.
