How Combining Human and Artificial Intelligence Might Be the Winning Combination

A lot gets written and debated about Artificial Intelligence these days. In that context, the recent report by the US National Science and Technology Council ‘Preparing for the future of Artificial Intelligence‘ is a must read.

One area that has struck me in particular is the reference to exceptional performance of the combination of human and artificial intelligence when is comes to pattern recognition. An example: “In one recent study, given images of lymph node cells, and asked to determine whether or not the cells contained cancer, an AI-based approach had a 7.5 percent error rate, where a human pathologist had a 3.5 percent error rate; a combined approach, using both AI and human input, lowered the error rate to 0.5 percent, representing an 85 percent reduction in error.”

It seems increasingly that this combination of two different perspectives, ours and the other one we are creating using Artificial Intelligence, could open us new frontiers. Artificial Intelligence in that sense seems rather a useful tool to broaden our perspectives and capabilities.