The rise of human-computer cooperation - Shyam Sankar

Key Takeaways

I'd like to tell you about two games of chess the first happened in 1997 which Garry Kasparov a human lost a deep-blue a machine to many this was the dawn of a new era one where man would be dominated by machine but here we are 20 years on and the greatest change in how we relate to computers is the iPad not how the second game was a freestyle chess tournament in 2005 and which man and machine could enter together as partners rather than adversaries if they so chose at first the results were predictable even a supercomputer was beaten by a grandmaster with a relatively weak laptop the surprise came at the end who won not a grandmaster with the supercomputer but actually two American amateurs using three relatively weak laptops their ability to coach and manipulate their computers to deeply explore specific positions effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of the grandmasters in the superior computational power of other adversaries this is an astonishing result average men average machines beating the best man the best machine and anyways isn't it supposed to be man versus machine instead it's about cooperation and the right type of cooperation we've been paying a lot of attention to Marvin Minsky's vision for artificial intelligence over the last 50 years it's a sexy vision for sure many of embraces become the dominant school of thought computer science but as we enter the era of big data of network systems of open platforms and embedded technology I'd like to suggest it's time to reevaluate an alternative vision that was actually developed around the same time I'm talking about JCR Licklider z' human-computer symbiosis perhaps better termed intelligence augmentation I a wick lighter was a computer science Titan who had a profound effect on the development of technology in the Internet his vision was to enable man and machine to cooperate in making decisions in controlling complex situations without the inflexible dependence on predetermined programs note that word cooperate Lickliter encourages us to take a toaster and make it data from Star Trek but to take a human and make her more capable humans are so amazing how we think our nonlinear approaches our creativity iterative hypotheses all very difficult if possible all for computers to do Lickliter intuitively realized this contemplating humans setting the goals formulating the hypotheses determining the criteria and performing the evaluation of course in other ways humans are so limited were terrible at scale computation and volume we require high-end talent management to keep the rock band together and playing Licklider for saw computers doing all of the routinize herbal work that was required to prepare the way for insights and decision-making silently without much fanfare this approach has been compiling victories beyond chess protein folding a topic that shares the incredible expansiveness of chess there are more ways of folding a protein than there are atoms in the universe this is a world-changing problem with huge implications for our ability to understand and treat disease and for this task supercomputer fueled brute force simply isn't enough fully a game created by computer scientists illustrates the value of the approach non technical non biologists amateurs play a video game in which they visually arranged the structure of the protein allowing the computer to manage the atomic forces and interactions and identify structural issues this approach beats supercomputers 50% of the time and tied 30% of the time folded recently made a notable and major scientific discovery by deciphering the structure of the Mason Fischer monkey virus a protease that had eluded determination for ever 10 years was solved by three players in a matter of days perhaps the first major scientific advance to come from playing the video game last year on the side of the twin towers a 9/11 memorial opened it displays the names of the thousands of victims using a beautiful concept called meaningful adjacency places the names and next to each other based on the relationships to one another friends families co-workers when you put it all together it's quite a computational challenge 3,500 victims 1,800 to JCCC requests the importance of the overall physical specifications in the final aesthetics when first reported by the media full credit for such a feat was given to an algorithm from the New York City design firm local projects the truth is a bit more nuanced while an algorithm was used to develop the underlying framework humans use that framework to design the final result so in this case a computer I've evaluated millions of possible layouts manage a complex relational system and kept track of a very large set of measurements and variables allowing the humans to focus on design and compositional choices so the more you look around you the more you see Licklider vision everywhere whether it's augmented reality in your iPhone or GPS in your car or human-computer symbiosis is making us more capable so if you want to improve human-computer symbiosis what can you do you can start by designing the human into the process instead of thinking about what a computer will do to solve the problem design the solution around what the human will do as well when you do this you'll quickly realize that you spend all of your time on the interface between man and machine specifically on designing away the friction in the interaction in fact this friction is more important than the power of the man or the power of the machine in determining overall capability that's why two amateurs with a few laptops handily beat a supercomputer and a grandmaster what Kasparov calls processes a byproduct of friction the better the process the less the friction and minimizing friction turns out to be this isof variable or take another example Big Data every interaction we have in the world is recorded by an ever-growing array of sensors your phone credit card computer the result is big data and it actually presents us with an opportunity to more deeply understand the human condition the major emphasis of most approaches to big data focus on how do I store this data how do I search this data how do i process this data these are necessary but insufficient questions the imperative is not to figure out how to compute but what to compute how do you impose human intuition on data at this scale again we start by designing the human to the process when PayPal was first starting as a business their biggest challenge was not how do I send money back and forth online it was how do I do that without being defrauded by organized crime why so challenging because while computers can learn to detect and identify fraud based on patterns they can't learn to do that based on patterns they've never seen before an organized crime has a lot in common with this audience brilliant people relentlessly resourceful entrepreneurial spirit and one huge and important difference purpose and so while computers alone can catch all about the cleverest fraudsters catching the cleverest it's the difference between success and failure there's a whole class of problems like this ones with adaptive adversaries they rarely if ever present with the repeatable pattern that's discernable to computers instead there's some inherent component of innovation or disruption and increasingly these problems are buried in big data for example terrorism terrorists are always adapting in minor and major ways to new circumstances and despite what you might see on TV these adaptations and the detection of them are fundamentally human computers don't detect novel patterns or new behaviors or humans do humans using technology testing hypotheses searching for insight by asking machines to do things for them Osama bin Laden was not caught by artificial intelligence he was caught by dedicated resourceful brilliant people in partnerships with various technologies as appealing as it might sound you cannot algorithmically data-mine your way to the answer there is no find terrorists button and the more data we integrate from a vast variety of sources across a wide variety of data formats from very disparate systems the less effective data mining can be instead people will have to look at data and search for insight and as Licklider foresaw long ago the key to great results here is the right type of cooperation and as Kasparov realized that means minimizing friction at the interface now this approach makes possible things like combing through all available data from very different sources identifying key relationships and putting of that in one place something that's been nearly impossible to do before the salm this has terrifying privacy and civil liberties implications to others it foretells of an era of greater privacy and civil liberties protections but privacy and civil liberties are of fundamental importance that must be acknowledged and they can't be swept aside even with the best of intense so let's explore through a couple of examples the impact that technologies built to drive human-computer symbiosis have had in recent time in October 2007 US and coalition forces raided an al Qaeda safe house in the city of Sinjar on the Syrian border of Iraq they found a treasure trove of documents 700 biographical sketches of foreign fighters these foreign fighters had left their families in the Gulf the Levant in North Africa to join al-qaeda in Iraq these records were human resource forms the foreign fighters filled them out as they joined the organization it turns out that al-qaeda too is not without its bureaucracy they answered questions like who recruited you what's your hometown what occupation do you seek and that last question a surprising insight was revealed the vast majority of foreign fighters were seeking to become suicide bombers for martyrdom hugely important since between 2003 and 2007 Iraq had thirteen hundred and eighty two suicide bombings a major source of instability analyzing this data was hard the originals were sheets of paper in Arabic that had to be scanned and translated the friction in the process did not allow for meaningful results in an operational timeframe using humans PDFs and tenacity alone the researchers had to lever up their human minds with technology to dive deeper to explore non-obvious hypotheses and in fact insights emerged 20% of the foreign fighters were from Libya 50% of those from a single town in Libya hugely important since prior statistics but that figure at 3% it also helped to hone in on a figure of rising importance in Al Quaida Abu Yahya al-libi a senior cleric in the Libyan Islamic fighting group in March of 2007 he gave a speech after worship was a surge and participation amongst Libyan foreign fighters perhaps most clever of all though and least obvious by flipping the data on its head the researchers were able to deeply explore the coordination networks in Syria that were ultimately responsible for receiving and transporting the foreign fighters to the border these were networks of mercenaries not ideologues who were in the coordination business for profit for example they charged Saudi foreign fighters substantially more than Libyans money that would have otherwise gone to al Qaeda perhaps the adversary would disrupt their own network if they knew they were cheating would-be jihadists in January 2010 a devastating 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti third deadliest earthquake of all time left 1 million people 10% of the population homeless one seemingly small aspect of the overall relief ever became increasingly important as the delivery of food and water soccer rolling January and February the dry months in Haiti yet many of the camps had developed standing water the only institution with detailed knowledge of Haiti's floodplains had been leveled in the earthquake leadership inside so the question is which camps are at risk how many people in these camps what's the timeline for flooding and give it very limited resources infrastructure how do we prioritize the relocation the data was incredibly disparate US Army had detailed knowledge for only a small section of the country there was data online from a 2006 environmental risk conference others geospatial data not have been integrated the human goal here was to identify camps for relocation based on priority need the computer had to integrate a vast amount of geospatial information social media data and relief organization information to answer this question by implementing a superior process what was otherwise a task for 40 people over three months became a simple job for three people in 40 hours all victories for human-computer symbiosis were more than 50 years into lick lighters vision for the future and the data suggest that we should be quite excited about tackling this century's hardest problems man and machine in cooperation together thank you