I'm here to offer you a new way to think about my field,
artificial intelligence.
I think the purpose of AI
is to empower humans with machine intelligence,
and as machines get smarter,
we get smarter.
I call this humanistic AI:
artificial intelligence designed to meet human needs
by collaborating and augmenting people.
Now today I'm happy to see
that the idea that intelligent assistant
is mainstream.
It's the well-accepted metaphor for the interface between humans and AI.
And the one I helped create is called Siri.
Now you know Siri.
Siri is the thing that knows your intent
and helps you do it for you,
helps you get things done,
but what you might not know is that we designed Siri
as humanistic AI,
to augment people with a conversational interface
that made it possible for them to use mobile computing,
regardless of who they were and their abilities.
Now for most of us,
the impact of this technology
is to make things a little bit easier to use,
but for my friend Daniel,
the impact of the AI in these systems is a life-changer.
You see, Daniel is a really social guy,
and he's blind and quadriplegic
which makes it hard to use those devices
that we all take for granted.
The last time I was at his house, his brother said,
"Hang on a second, Daniel's not ready.
He's on the phone with a woman he met online."
I'm like, "That's cool, how'd he do it?"
Well, Daniel uses Siri to manage his own social life,
his email, text, and phone,
without depending on his caregivers.
This is kind of interesting, right?
The irony here is great.
Here's the man whose relationship with AI
helps him have relationships with genuine human beings.
And this is humanistic AI.
Another example with life-changing consequences
is diagnosing cancer.
When a doctor suspects cancer,
they take a sample, send it to a pathologist
who looks at it under a microscope.
Now, pathologists look at hundreds of slides
and millions of cells every day,
so to support this task,
some researchers made an AI classifier.
Now the classifier says, "Is this cancer or is this not cancer?"
looking at the picture.
The classifier was pretty good,
but not as good as the person,
who got it right most of the time.
But when they combine the ability
of the machine and the human together,
accuracy went to 99.5 percent.
Adding that AI to a partnership
eliminated 85 percent of the errors that the human pathologist
would have made working alone.
That's a lot of cancer
that would have otherwise gone untreated.
Now, for the curious, it turns out that the human is better at
rejecting false positives
and the machine was better at recognizing those hard-to-spot cases,
but the lesson here isn't about which agent is better
at this image classification task.
Those things are changing every day.
The lesson here
is that by combining the abilities of the human and machine,
it created a partnership
that had superhuman performance.
And that is humanistic AI.
Now let's look at another example
with turbocharging performance.
This is design.
Now, let's say you're an engineer.
You want to design a new frame for a drum.
You get out your favorite software tools,
cad tools,
and you enter the form and the materials and then you analyze performance.
That gives you one design.
If you give those same tools to an AI,
it can generate thousands of designs.
This video by Autodesk is amazing.
This is real stuff.
So now this transforms how we do design.
The human engineer now
says what the machine, what the design should achieve,
and the machine says, here's the possibilities.
Now in her job now, the engineer's job
is to pick the one that best meets the goals of the design,
which she knows as a human
better than anyone else,
using human judgment and expertise.
In this case, the winning form
looks kind of like something nature would have designed,
minus a few million years of evolution
and all that unnecessary fur.
Now let's see where this idea
of humanistic AI might lead us
if we follow it into the speculative beyond.
What's a kind of augmentation that we would all like to have?
Well, how about cognitive enhancement?
Instead of asking
how smart can we make our machines,
let's ask how smart
can our machines make us?
I mean, take memory for example.
Memory is the foundation of human intelligence,
but human memory is famously flawed.
We're great at telling stories,
but not getting the details right,
and our memories, they decay over time.
I mean, like, where did the '60s go, and can I go there too?
But what if you could have a memory
that was as good as computer memory,
and was about your life?
What if you could remember every person you ever met,
how to pronounce their name,
their family details, their favorite sports,
the last conversation you had with them?
If you had this memory all your life,
you could have the AI look at all the interactions
you had with people over time
and help you reflect
on the long arc of your relationships.
What if you could have the AI read
everything you've ever read
and listen to every song you've ever heard?
From the tiniest clue, it could help you retrieve
anything you've ever seen or heard before.
Imagine what that would do for the ability to make new connections
and form new ideas.
And what about our bodies?
What if we could remember the consequences of every food we eat,
every pill we take,
every all-nighter we pull?
We could do our own science on our own data
about what makes us feel good
and stay healthy,
and imagine how this could revolutionize
the way we manage allergies and chronic disease.
I believe that AI will make
personal memory enhancement a reality.
I can't say when or what form factors are involved,
but I think it's inevitable
because the very things
that make AI successful today,
the availability of comprehensive data
and the ability for machines to make sense of that data
can be applied to the data of our lives,
and those data are here today,
available for all of us because we lead
digitally mediated lives,
in mobile and online.
In my view, a personal memory is a private memory.
We get to choose what is and is not recalled and retained.
It's absolutely essential
that this be kept very secure.
Now for most of us,
the impact of augmented personal memory
will be a more improved mental gain,
maybe, hopefully, a bit more social grace.
But for the millions who suffer
from Alzheimer's and dementia,
the difference that augmented memory could make
is a difference between a life of isolation
and a life of dignity and connection.
We are in the middle
of a renaissance
in artificial intelligence right now.
I mean, in just the past few years
we're beginning to see solutions to AI problems
that we have struggled with
literally for decades:
speech understanding, text understanding,
image understanding.
We have a choice in how we use this powerful technology.
We can choose to use AI to automate
and compete with us,
or we can use AI to augment and collaborate with us,
to overcome our cognitive limitations
and to help us do what we want to do
only better.
And as we discover new ways
to give machines intelligence,
we can distribute that intelligence
to all of the AI assistants in the world,
and therefore to every person, regardless of circumstance.
And that is why,
every time a machine gets smarter,
we get smarter.
That is an AI worth spreading.
Thank you.
(Applause)