 How would Stephen compare humans and machines?
The Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI. Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field? Stephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. One of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost.
 They are complementary in their abilities and can benefit from one another
 He thinks they are similar enough that a conflict will arise  They are complementary in their abilities and can benefit from one another  They operate with similar systems of intelligence but to entirely different ends  Humans are at risk of losing access to knowledge if they let machines take over most tasks