The Turing Trap

A really really long time ago (in AI years) MIT Professor Erik Brynjolfsson wrote a paper titled?The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence in which he observed that while “...the benefits of human-like artificial intelligence (HLAI) include soaring productivity, increased leisure, and perhaps most profoundly, a better understanding of our own minds..." but at the same time "...as machines become better substitutes for human labor, workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become increasingly dependent on those who control the technology...”

Brynjolfsson points to an important distinction in the way we deploy artificial intelligence -- augmentation vs. automation. As we rapidly approach the day when human-like AI can be easily and cheaply deployed to replicate human capabilities, it is incumbent upon us to carefully weigh the difference between these two approaches and the world we will live in as a result of our choices. Augmenting human capabilities can lead to new possibilities, not simply a reduction of time and cost to doing what we have always done, which is the promise of automation.

The challenge is that our decision making processes overly incentivize automation. Companies see a much easier path to obvious and immediate benefit if they elect to do the same thing faster and cheaper. It is a much more complicated task, requiring a different set of skills to innovate and do something differently.

The language of the "Turing Trap" also encompasses the economic imbalance that arises when labor is removed from activities through automation as the owners of the automation receive all of the benefits of the productivity improvement, leading to greater inequality.

This is not a choice between one or the other path, between either augmentation or automation. There are countless areas where human work should be eliminated through automation (I gave three such examples in my article yesterday on AI in the Courtroom ). But each of us - both in our own journey of adapting to a world of human-like AI, and in thinking about the organizations we influence - should be considering the harder question of augmentation:

Augmenting humans with AI opens new abilities and opportunities, far beyond what humans can achieve alone. Machines can perceive, act, and comprehend in ways humans cannot, offering a much larger set of possibilities for collaboration. By focusing on augmentation rather than mere replication of human tasks we can foster greater innovation and achieve greater societal benefits.