Are you smart? Smarter than AI?

How do you know? Well, I’ll tell you how you know.

I bet if you asked that question to audience in different age and countries, the answers are always the same. The people in the room are smart. They’re smart because just like everywhere else on Earth, from about the age of six, they were let into a room when a bell rang.

Everybody’s the same age. We put them in a room with a stranger and the stranger ask them questions. If they give the right answer, congratulations, they’re smart! They can go on to the next grade.

Then they do it again, and again, and again, and we end up with 18 year old who think they’re smart because they’re really good at answering other people’s questions. Well, here’s the problem, that is an Industrial Era Education System, and it is completely wrong for a world of DIGITAL CENTAURS.

It is completely wrong for a world where you’ll be working in symbiosis, hopefully with things that will be much better at answering questions than you are. Remember? AI won Jeopardy back in 2011. Oh, maybe you’re good at math.

Remember, AI just won both chess and the Go. Okay, you have got to get pass the idea that you’re smart because you’ve done well in school. The quality of your life probably depends more on the quality of your questions than the quality of your answers. Your ability to work with AI in symbiosis depends much more on the quality of your questions than the quality of your answers. And here we come to the meaning of digital centaur.

Centaurs were the name Garry Kasparov chose when he organized the world’s first freestyle chess competition in 2005. In freestyle chess, teams of humans and computers can play chess against other teams of humans and computers. A centaur is a team of humans and computers competing against another team of humans and computers, which they did in the world’s first freestyle chess competition. If you think about the world of business today, you have teams of computers competing against other teams of humans and computers, trying to win the game.

Go, and Jeopardy, and Chess, all of these are games of perfect information, and that’s where AI will continue to excel in the foreseeable future. AI is making rapid progress, but it’s going to remain quite narrow for the foreseeable future and it’s certainly going to be mostly working on questions where you have quite large data sets, if not perfect information.

In addition, we really are at the stage AI’s making huge progress. But right now, the big goal is to make AI about as intelligent as a moth’s brain. So, don’t overestimate the progress in AI. At the same time, I write about chess here because it’s chess that gave us the notion of digital centaurs.

The world’s first freestyle chess competition took place in Barcelona. Over 70 teams of humans and computers were competing against other teams of humans and computers. Who do you think won? The AI or the really strong humans? The winner surprised everybody.

and the winners were two amateurs with three so-so machines. It turns out that a relatively weak human and a normal machine, but a good process for coaching those machines to help them compete actually beats strong computing power along strong AI.

Worth reading: Kasparov, Gary. The New York Review of Books, “The Chess Master and the Computer”, 11 Feb. 2010.

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