AI + IQ = AIQ

​Over the weekend, I've read a thought provocative book by Nick Polson and James Scott "AIQ - how people and machines are smarter together".  A fascinating book exploring the history of the ideas that drive this technology of the future and demystifies the core concepts behind it; the result is a positive and entertaining look at the great potential unlocked by joining human creativity with powerful machines. 

Imagine that you could travel back in time to the 1990s, When you downloaded your first web browsers, or to the 2000s when you bought your first smartphone and open accounts on Facebook and Twitter. 


In light of what you’ve learned since then, what advice you give yourself -  about what information to share, what photos to post and what habits to cultivate? Or if you had the year to corporate Chiefs and government regulators, what would you want them to know? What stories would you tell about how do your technologies have changed your life for the better?  What pathologies would you ask them to prevent? 

Artificial intelligence will soon play a role in decisions that are much more important than the films people see on Netflix, the music day here on Spotify, or the news stories they are recommended by Facebook. They will inform what medical treatment people receive, what jobs they compete for, what college did attend, but loans they qualify for and yes, what jail sentence they receive when they commit a crime.

In thinking about these complex issues, we cannot rely on advice from a time traveler. It is just us, and we have to get this right. There is much to gain but also much to lose, and the balance we strike between costs and benefits will be affected enormously by whether people in charge understand how artificial intelligence technologies really work. If we muddle through or worse steel, if we let the world's tech companies just move fast and break stuff while the rest of us waste our time worrying pointlessly about sci-fi nightmares we will kill the credibility of these AI systems before they even have a chance to mature, and we will deprive humanity of so much promise. But now imagine a world where we are actually smart about our efforts a world where we put the right experts and the right legal protection in the right places, and where we are eternally vigilant about the biases and assumptions of our algorithms. In that world, our decision-making protocols could become radically better than their bias riddled ones we have now, the ones that give an underserved leg up to those with the pretty your face, or the lively or manner, or the richer dad, Or the wider skin. 

Our collective vision and technology have reached a point where we can successfully teach machines to drive a car, predict kidney disease, and carry on a conversation. We can certainly teach those machines to play fair. They might even teach us. Everyone agrees that some matters are too important to be settled by an accountable algorithm, operating alone. Some of us would just go a step further and say the same thing about people. When it comes to important decisions in life, we can and should combine artificial intelligence with human insight and human values. All it takes is people and machines working together.  

To learn more I highly recommend reading AIQ as Nick Polson and James Schott take us under the hood of AI and data science, showing that behind most algorithms is the story of a person trying to solve a problem and make the world better.