Artificial intelligence is for optimization?—?human intelligence is for innovation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be a brilliant product of human innovation. It automates a wide variety of business processes to the scale of the internet, of email, and of digital media. It can do things that humans never could — like predict hospital outcomes from Electronic Medical Recordsand explore the galaxy using datasets too massive for humans to fathom.

While a significant innovation in itself, AI only produces optimizations for existing practice. It detects patterns, but does not comprehend the physical world. AI can inform and inspire, but does not produce innovation per se. Algorithms that automatically recommend media, place advertisements and detect fraud are all built upon an explicit foundation —that the training data that the state of things will remain the same.

Of course, things never remain the same. Markets change, patient care evolves, the use of tech and AI in Sports changes, science and technology move forward. With each progressive stage of an organization, AI needs to be re-trained and re-purposed, much as a factory needs to be re-tooled to produce a different product.

The use of Intelligent Augmentation is as vital and important as AI.

For example, AI trained to autonomously design a new office chair isn’t able to conceive of the ergonomic advantages of the standing desk. It doesn’t know what a chair really is — all it knows is the 3D shape of chairs as defined by its training data. To tie-in the David Foster Wallace cartoon above, AI lives in water, yet it doesn’t know what water is.

My friend Jesse Paquette of Tag.bio authored this article.