December 16, 2018

Augmented Humanity

This week I caught a few minutes of an interesting conversation on the radio.

The speaker was Dr Vivienne Ming, and the snippet I caught was about the age-old problem of IT, now a problem of AI – namely, that in order to find the best solution to a problem, you have to truly understand the problem first.

More than that, you have to work out the best solution before you apply technology to automate it. And that’s the really hard part, as Amazon found out.

Process is great, but only if it augments our humanity – and like AI, the goal of process should be to as Dr Ming says, to “take the best of what people can do and make it even better by leveraging what machines can do” – to make processes that “challenge us to be better people.”

We could start by recognising ourselves and others as people first.