Extended Intelligence
= "EI ... recognizes intelligence as a distributed phenomenon beyond any one human being, and seeks ways to manifest a powerful decentralized human intelligence". [1]
Description
Joichi Ito:
"Beyond distinguishing between creating an artificial intelligence (AI), or augmenting human intelligence (IA), perhaps the first and fundamental question is where does intelligence lie? Hasn’t it always resided beyond any single mind, extended by machines into a network of many minds and machines, all of them interacting as a kind of networked intelligence that transcends and merges humans and machines?
If intelligence is networked to begin with, wouldn’t this thing we are calling “AI” just augment this networked intelligence, in a very natural way? While the notion of collective intelligence and the extended mind are not new ideas, is there a lens to look at modern AI in terms of its contribution to the collective intelligence?
We propose a kind of Extended Intelligence (EI), understanding intelligence as a fundamentally distributed phenomenon. As we develop increasingly powerful tools to process information and network that processing, aren't we just adding new pieces to the EI that every actor in the network is a part of?
Marvin Minsky conceived AI not just as a way to build better machines, but as a way to use machines to understand the mind itself. In this construction of Extended Intelligence, does the EI lens bring us closer to understanding what makes us human, by acknowledging that what part of what makes us human is that our intelligence lies so far outside any one human skull?
At the individual level, in the future we may look less like terminators and more like cyborgs; less like isolated individuals, and more like a vast network of humans and machines creating an ever-more-powerful EI. Every elements at every scale connected through an increasingly distributed variety of interfaces. Each actor doing what it does best -- bits, atoms, cells and circuits -- each one fungible in many ways, but tightly integrated and part of a complex whole." (https://pubpub.ito.com/pub/extended-intelligence)