If there is one thing we humans are pretty good at than all other species, its our cognitive abilities. Our cognitive abilities gives rise to our memory, intelligence, thinking and imaginative skills and is uniquely found in humans.
We are not the best with muscle power, but our cognitive abilities surpass all other types of powers. It enables us to leverage everything found in nature for our welfare and think beyond food and shelter.
With advancement in science and technology we are able to inject some fraction of human cognitive abilities in our tools. From a calculator doing our mind boggling calculation, robots replicating human memory with infallible storage capabilities and smartphone communicating and transferring human interaction in real time. Our tools and devices are extension of our cognition. They help us enhance our ability to do our works efficiently. We have come a long way from using wheels to run 10*faster than cheetah to using smartphones to communicate our mind with the world in real time.
With advance technologies we are at the dawn of a new age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it won't be long before our Digital Partners (in other words: our devices) take on and surpass human intelligence. The best way to prepare for this paradigm shift will be to treat these Digital Partners as tools designed to make our lives more efficient and productive.Not to compete but to augment our capabilities and increase our efficiency. You are already living a hybrid life if you have a smartphone because your digital partners are extension of YOU.
Today we will deep dive on this crucial subject of Hybrid Intelligence where we will look into what is Hybrid Intelligence(HI), Lessons from Industrial age, Advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence(AI), How to prepare for age of Hybrid skills, Examples of HI based startups and finally conclusion.
Let’s dive in
What is Hybrid Intelligence
Hybrid intelligence is the middle man trying to bridge the gap between human and Artificial Intelligence by bringing the best of both world’s intelligence for best results. It combines human specific qualities with Artificial intelligence.
Humans are good at:
1. Doing novel things.
2. Find pattern in completely unrelated fields, domain, situation, products and systems.
3. Empathy
4. Combine previous experiences to develop an intuition and common sense towards new objects.
5. They are good with new ideas, edge cases and situations which require a unique treatment and perspective.
But one thing where we lags the most is repetitive work or doing one type of work at scale without any errors.
On the other hand machines are exceptionally good at doing things at scale,For example - A software code getting distributed across the globe to every machine producing the product again and again without any error.
HI is nothing but a bridge to connect the best of AI with best of Human Intelligence.
There are two sides of HI:
Augmentation: It enhance existing human capabilities and sometimes even add more capabilities. Augmentation puts humans before profit.
Automation: It completely replace humans from the work.
Augmentation is advantageous for humanity but automation can raise some dangerous alarms for humanity.
Lessons from Industrial age
We are expert in outsourcing and enhancing our potential with tools and machines. This is evident from our tools which we use to simplify our life and make ourselves more efficient.
Invention of machines during Industrial age was a big step to free up human hands and muscle energy. Similarly age of AI will free up our minds for more high quality work creative works.
In industrial age new machinery removed a lot of humans from workforce, trucks replace human carriage, printing press replaced copy writers, agricultural tools improved our yield 10*X by removing humans from workforce. Tools have been pivotal in human progress
Tools and machines drastically improve the quality and scale of work and can replicate physical works done by humans. This brought a rapid change in the way humans used to work, the focus shifted from muscle power to mental power. Machines took over the heavy lifting part and freed humans for complex mental tasks, needless to say we were not prepared for this rapid shift in work. This leads to lots of restructuring and structuring, resistance and revolt from both employer and employee side.
But since machines were a symbol of progress they won the race and those who couldn’t adapt to this new change were left.
If you look closely to what was exactly going on in industrial age, you will find that machines freed up humans from physical heavy lifting work and this new change set humans free from physical jobs to engineering and complex STEM Jobs.
Now can you correlate this with current situation ?
AI is offering the substitute to logical STEM jobs done by our brain, body senses of vision, speech and is even expanding our senses. Soon they will surpass humans in logic based works and humans will be freed for more creative works.
To understand that a bit more let’s go a step closer and see how our brain works:
If we roughly classify all the work done by our brain it will mainly consist of two types of function, first type of work based on logical order, structure and calculation and second type will mainly consist creative, empathetic and conscious work.
AI has been able to surpass humans in almost 100% work which can be structured, can be put into clearly defined steps and logical orders.
The creative side of our brain is rather unexplored and unnoticed because it can’t be measured and trained for as easily as for technical and logical works.
Creativity and human skills which can’t be measured are our best assets for hybrid work because it insures that the core of human cognitive skills can never be replaced or automated by advance future AI.
AI have surpassed what our spinal cord, brainstem, cerebellum, occipital lobe, parietal lobe and temporal lobe can do. Humans are left with the work done by frontal lobe where we still have advantage over computers. Only frontal lobe tasks seem to be dominant for humans at this point making creativity, emotion and empathy, planning and executive function and consciousness itself the key characteristics of the “jobs of the future”. A clearly signal that future jobs will be full of centaurs (human-computer teams)
Advantages of Hybrid Intelligence
Its clear that future is hybrid and much of its promise lies in augmenting rather than replacing human intelligence. Augmentation puts humans before machines. At its core, it starts from the principle to enable humans be able to work harmoniously with intelligent machines. The potential for its uses is limitless.
Some examples:
AI aided health devices can supercharge research for the cure of diseases, offer innovative solutions to environmental problems and even tackle intractable social ills with humane solutions. AI devices provide a huge leverage to human body in terms of flexible size, high memory, precision, calculation, surgical hands, camera like memory and many more. A well trained doctor can’t look in every cell of human body and identify cancerous cells, they can only see them once it’s in the visual range of human eyes but an AI bot has no limits of visible spectrum and dimension.
In such cases AI is enhancing human capabilities by freeing up humans from the limits of their body and brain size.
This is the future of work: collective human intelligence partnering with high-performing Artificial Intelligence to solve difficult problems, create new possibilities and beautify the world. - AI Theology
AI can even add new senses to human body. There are no limits to how big a machine could be, but there is limit to how big our brain could be. You can imagine HI as a wire or interface connecting human brains with machines and now those machines are part of humans life.
Disadvantages of Hybrid Intelligence
As we discussed in the very beginning, HI comes in two forms one is augmentation and other is automation.
The main disadvantages comes with automation and are as follows:
All of human jobs getting automated.
AI taking power over humanity.
Disconnection from humans.
Rise in mental health problems with lost human touch in very work.
Rise in dangerous war if these technologies get in wrong hands.
I don’t need to stress much on this side since movies like terminator, matrix, conjuring have already done a great job creating fear around AI.
I agree with the fact that automation can put a large section of humans out of jobs if they keep doing the same jobs they were doing 10 years back.
But how can we avoid that future ?
By upskilling ourselves for advance Hybrid jobs which require a unique human factor which can’t be replicated with a machine.
Here is how…
Prepare yourself for age of Hybrid Intelligence :
Upskilling in itself is a big domain but let’s try to pinpoint some specific skills and strategies that can help you thrive when hybrid intelligence strikes your work, job, education and becomes a necessity of life.
Disclaimer: I’ve summarized popular inventions and skills based on my research and experiences feel free to add some more as per your needs, job requirements and personal experiences.
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. - William Gibson
Some future technologies which will become a part of our daily life in 2030 are already in market and is being used and tested by the developed class nations like USA, EU and parent developer country.
As seen in the past, first tremors of Industrial Revolution caught up in England and then spread in other parts of the world, similarly this time developed nations will adopt Hybrid machines earlier than poor nations. Some common glimpses of that is auto pilot Tesla cars already beaming in US, Facebook Oculus making virtual meetings more interactive through its VR technology, Microsoft mesh disrupting the way teams collab and work together in virtual world, Google Starline give you a peek on how the future family gatherings and relationships will flourish with technology. These technologies have the power to completely shatter your lifestyle if they join mainstream.
The goal is to prepare for consequences coming up with these new fleets of innovative solutions to enrich humans life, one way to do that is to adopt life long learning habit.
Gone are the days when learning was limited by age, we are entering in an era where no job is permanent and constant upskilling is the only way to navigate through the future.
Starts getting good with transferable skills like empathy, creativity and critical thinking. They will constitute 50% of hybrid skills requirements.
Technical and Non-technical skills of Hybrid era
Hybrid skills, are skills that bridge the gap of technology and humans. They require both technical and non-technical capabilities, and are in high demand. Employment and salary growth is particularly high for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skill. (Based on a Survey)
A study that examined the US labor market of 1980 and 2012 confirmed that jobs requiring high levels of human factor grow by +12% and pure math based STEM jobs decreased by -3.3%.
In technical skills, you need to constantly be updated with new inventions, programming languages, framework, protocol, products, new trends, discoveries and learn how these technologies can be used in your job roles. The only way to stay ahead in tech is to keep learning and be updated with new things coming up in your area of interest to pick the right opportunities at the right time.
On non technical side, unique human skills like creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, go-getter attitude, curiosity and emotional intelligence(EQ) are in high demand.
The good news is most of these skills comes very naturally to humans, but we have lost them while growing up. Automation jobs will free humans from unfulfilling tasks, to help humans focus on their unique human skills.
When technical knowledge combines with non-technical human skills, it does wonders. Simpy because now you are able to use an extended version of your capabilities by leveraging the power of AI and can implement its outcome to create value for a human needs and requirements.
Companies working towards Hybrid Future of humanity
Cindicator - AI in financial market
Cindicator, combines the collective intelligence of human analysts with machine learning models to make intelligent investment decisions.
“Cindicator fuses together machine learning and market analysis for asset management and financial analytics. The Cindicator team dubs this human/machine predictive model Hybrid Intelligence, as it combines artificial intelligence with the opinions of human analysts “for the efficient management of investors’ capital in traditional financial and cryptomarkets.”- Colin Harper
Human analysts use their common sense and intuition to find anomalies in data that machines cannot see. Machines look for patterns in millions of data points, machine do same calculation and analysis at scale in seconds that a human brain will take decades to finish. This genius combination of machine and human puts Cindicator ahead of its competitors.
CrowdSynth is a model that combines Machine Learning and decision-theoretic optimization techniques to pull together the complementary strengths of humans and machines. It uses automated computer vision and combines it with supervised learning by crowd sourcing from humans volunteers. It use human intelligence for edge cases where it is unsure of its analysis.
Botkin - Hybrid AI in healthcare products
Botkin utilize our unique AI + Human technology to build a system around healthcare products and services. By using mathematical patient representation models for diagnostics and disease risk assessment. They minimize the risk of skipping pathologies in the early stages of oncological diseases.
Conclusion
AI is here to stay it’s not just the future of technology; it is embedding in every aspect of our lives. From your personalized mails, shopping experience on amazon, entertainment through personalized feeds, Ads recommendation and in many other subtle ways in which your device understands you.
What you can do is to update your technical skills and be exceptionally good with your unique human skills.
Hybrid Intelligence is a big domain and we barely scratched the surface in this post. My main goal was to establish a basic understanding of HI and highlight points to help you prepare yourself for hybrid work without getting into the technicalities of Hybrid Intelligence itself.
I will dive deep into other aspects on HI in future posts. Stay tuned
If you liked this, share with your friend circle to spread awareness and help your friends with their future career options.
Until then
Stay hungry, stay curious
Sneha Prajapati