By Alex Bates, BS ’00 (Computer and Information Science)
We are about to become superhuman. Serial AI entrepreneur Alex Bates explains how the combination of AI with human intelligence -- called Intelligence Augmentation -- has revolutionary potential.
After a decade on the front lines of the AI, facilitating the collaboration of humans an AI, he saw first hand how humans and AI were highly complementary and augment each other; and also how little this was recognized or researched. When his last AI venture was acquired, Bates created a global mastermind network of applied AI technologists and researchers to get more perspectives on these issues, with membership from Caltech, MIT, Harvard, Oxford, UCSD, USC, and other leading institutions and companies.
It became clear that while there has been a global arms race in AI and machine learning, it has been almost exclusively focused on replicating human intelligence. Augmenting human intelligence represents a tiny fraction of the total research and development.
This book explores how augmenting humans, combining human intuition and artificial intelligence, will herald an unprecedented era of productivity and financial success. The coming wave of human centered AI will help us solve the biggest problems facing humanity while also protecting us from rogue or weaponized AI systems.
The Augmented Age represents a massive opportunity not only for AI investors and technologists, but for all humans as it unlocks our unique gifts of intuition and human-centric intelligence for this next era. For all human beings, it offers the chance to harness our intuition and human-centered skills, areas that are not the focus of the current educational system.
Bates includes a framework for creating hybrid solutions combining AI, machine learning, and human intuition that can predict the future, improve our social lives, eliminate scarcity, and provide a clear roadmap to abundance and prosperity in the financial, health, and relationship industries that represents trillions in economic opportunity over the next decade.
Amazon, October 2018