Artificial Intelligence is an inescapable reality of today’s Information Age. Crowdoscope’s new report aims to provide a comprehensive overview on a topic that has drawn interest from multiple disciplines – discussing its impact on society, as well as its implications for market and opinion research.
We advocate the narrative of AI as ‘Augmented Intelligence’, a symbiosis of Collaborative Cognition whereby technology and humans complement each other by performing the tasks most suitable to them. These cognitive technologies are a necessary companion in our modern world, characterised by vast swathes of unstructured data, and more crucially, a catalyst to human progress. Outsourcing the menial yet necessary data-processing tasks to such machines is not only faster and more accurate, but leaves humans with more time to engage in creative pursuits; space to conceive, create, evaluate, learn and improve.
Shying away from the possibilities opened by AI technologies out of fear of machine domination is not only hysterical and narrow-sighted, but fundamentally mistaken. The current landscape sees technologies firmly in the realm of narrow AI, rather than the general AI of common-sense and reactive reasoning which can be likened to human intelligence.
Despite the apparent mystical capabilities of algorithms, fundamentally, they are only as good as the information they have available to them; a state of dependence that infers this technology will always have a human master. It is important to remember that no matter how sophisticated AI technologies become, humans will always have an opinion, and with this comes the power to control the fate of such technologies.
We hope those working in Digital Social Innovation, Market Research, Internal Communications, Computer Science and Human Resources find this report is valuable.
The full report can be downloaded for free here: Collaborative Cognition: When Human and Machine Intelligence Combine
