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AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It
- David De Cremer
- Garry Kasparov
Artificial intelligence isn’t coming for your job, but it will be your new coworker. Here’s how to get along.
Will smart machines really replace human workers? Probably not. People and AI both bring different abilities and strengths to the table. The real question is: how can human intelligence work with artificial intelligence to produce augmented intelligence. Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov offers some unique insight here. After losing to IBM’s Deep Blue, he began to experiment how a computer helper changed players’ competitive advantage in high-level chess games. What he discovered was that having the best players and the best program was less a predictor of success than having a really good process. Put simply, “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.” As leaders look at how to incorporate AI into their organizations, they’ll have to manage expectations as AI is introduced, invest in bringing teams together and perfecting processes, and refine their own leadership abilities.
In an economy where data is changing how companies create value — and compete — experts predict that using artificial intelligence (AI) at a larger scale will add as much as $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030 . As AI is changing how companies work, many believe that who does this work will change, too — and that organizations will begin to replace human employees with intelligent machines . This is already happening: intelligent systems are displacing humans in manufacturing, service delivery, recruitment, and the financial industry, consequently moving human workers towards lower-paid jobs or making them unemployed. This trend has led some to conclude that in 2040 our workforce may be totally unrecognizable .
- David De Cremer is a professor of management and technology at Northeastern University and the Dunton Family Dean of its D’Amore-McKim School of Business. His website is daviddecremer.com .
- Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative. He writes and speaks frequently on politics, decision-making, and human-machine collaboration. Kasparov became the youngest world chess champion in history at 22 in 1985 and retained the top rating in the world for 20 years. His famous matches against the IBM super-computer Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997 were key to bringing artificial intelligence, and chess, into the mainstream. His latest book on artificial intelligence and the future of human-plus-machine is Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins (2017).
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