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This was the idea behind an alternative to the quest for pure artificial intelligence: pursuing instead the augmented intelligence that occurs when machines become partners with people. The strategy of combining computer and human capabilities, of creating a human-computer symbiosis, turned out to be more fruitful than the pursuit of machines that could think on their own.
Licklider helped chart that course back in 1960 in his paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which proclaimed: “Human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”20 His ideas built on the memex personal computer that Va
The Bush-Licklider approach was given a friendly interface by Engelbart, who in 1968 demonstrated a networked computer system with an intuitive graphical display and a mouse. In a manifesto titled “Augmenting Human Intellect,” he echoed Licklider. The goal, Engelbart wrote, should be to create “an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with . . . high-powered electronic aids.” Richard Brautigan, in his poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” expressed that dream a bit more lyrically: “a cybernetic meadow / where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony.”
The teams that built Deep Blue and Watson have adopted this symbiosis approach rather than pursue the objective of the artificial intelligence purists. “The goal is not to replicate human brains,” says John Kelly, the director of IBM Research. Echoing Licklider, he adds, “This isn’t about replacing human thinking with machine thinking. Rather, in the era of cognitive systems, humans and machines will collaborate to produce better results, each bringing their own superior skills to the partnership.”21
An example of the power of this human-computer symbiosis arose from a realization that struck Kasparov after he was beaten by Deep Blue. Even in a rule-defined game such as chess, he came to believe, “what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice versa.” That gave him an idea for an experiment: “What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners?” When he and another grandmaster tried that, it created the symbiosis that Licklider had envisioned. “We could concentrate on strategic pla
A tournament along these lines was held in 2005. Players could work in teams with computers of their choice. Many grandmasters entered the fray, as did the most advanced computers. But neither the best grandmaster nor the most powerful computer won. Symbiosis did. “The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers,” Kasparov noted. “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.” The final wi
In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers.
In a similar fashion, IBM decided that the best use of Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer, would be for it to collaborate with humans rather than try to top them. One project involved using the machine to work in partnership with doctors on cancer treatment plans. “The Jeopardy! challenge pitted man against machine,” said IBM’s Kelly. “With Watson and medicine, man and machine are taking on a challenge together—and going beyond what either could do on its own.”23 The Watson system was fed more than 2 million pages from medical journals and 600,000 pieces of clinical evidence, and could search up to 1.5 million patient records. When a doctor put in a patient’s symptoms and vital information, the computer provided a list of recommendations ranked in order of its confidence.24
In order to be useful, the IBM team realized, the machine needed to interact with human doctors in a ma
That was one of the aspects of Watson that impressed Gi
Watson was a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. “The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neuma
But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a breast cancer specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of the team that worked with Watson. “Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and medicine will evolve with it,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28