Gigaom AI Minute – May 12

Transcript

In the movie Idiocracy, each subsequent generation of humans got dumber and dumber and were barely able to use the equipment that their forebearers had built. Do I think this will happen? No I don't. To begin with, there is a well-documented phenomenon known as the Flynn effect that says that for at least 100 years, all around the world, IQs have been rising. There's a lot of debate about why this happens, but it's certainly something that has happened.

But I will say that artificial intelligence will effectively make us dramatically smarter as well. Think about the Tricorder on Star Trek, that you could just hover that thing above a person and it would tell you what was wrong with them and so forth. Imagine when we have AI in the tools that we use in our day-to-day lives. If your iron is an AI iron and your skillet is an AI skillet and all of your tools have that technology embedded in them, then, effectively, you are a great cook and you are great at all of these different things because you happen to have these tools that have this additional capability.

I don't think it's going to dumb us down in any way. I don't see any evidence that that’s happened. But it will certainly augment us in a profound and powerful way.