Why Humans need AI
It all begins with an idea.
As demanded by the unpredictability of the world economy, this human ability to reinvent has protected us as a species. However, the real motivating factor for starting Curioux was the pace at which the world shifted from big data analytics into predictive insights into real-world actions into outsourced understanding.
Big Data Analytics:
During the Zika epidemic, I was contracted by the Centers for Disease Control to handle all Southeast (FL, GA, SC, MS, AL, and Caribbean) data coming into the Emergency Operations Center and present the daily case counts at press briefings. Over the course of that role, the question changed: What happened yesterday -> What is happening -> What will happen?
Predictive Insights:
The advent of social media and the digitization of systems provided more data to harvest and analyze (transactional, personal, and sentiment) and made it easier to apply predictive analytics, thereby enabling understanding, nudging, and influencing the formation of consumer preferences.
Real-World Actions:
As more people got online, I witnessed the faster, rippling effects of news / social media posts galvanizing real-world movements and actions (e.g., 1% protests, Arab Spring, Instagram/TikTok trends), leading to novel human behavior and exposures (e.g., Monkeypox). These cascading effects are becoming faster and triggered by an increasingly reactive global situation (more extreme weather events, social conflict, and the rise of misinformation). Our human world is directly influenced by digital conversations.
Outsourced Understanding:
In 2023, we enter the age of machine understanding. Emerging research advocates for Human – AI teaming as an urgent species-level priority to solve the increasingly complex, complicated world we now inhabit.
A type of AI, Bayesian Neural Nets, underpins many of today’s digital systems (e.g., insurance companies, financial trading, etc.) and has a capacity for a billion neural connections. The human brain can only generate a trillion neural connections biologically. We are unable, as a species, to handle the current complexity building up around us.
We're at a point where humans can't handle the complexity building around us. AI is becoming necessary, not optional. This is a reality that needs to be taken seriously. One of the most essential questions is:
what stays human? What will remain unique to us?