Being a creative person, I am always on the look out for a way of mixing words that might be a new way to describe something that is not well described today. As I speak to audiences about business intelligence and how it will move us to artificial intelligence engines that run our organizations, I have been struggling to replace the AI moniker. Artificial intelligence was never a good descriptor of a software application that would appear to be able to think. The reality is AI is just a sophisticated set of rules that simulate how a human might process a set of variables. The human brain is an amazing computer – even in a low IQ person. The speed at which it can discern a flying object that is coming toward me as safe, or deadly is amazing. However, the brain is really just a wet-ware computer when it comes to solving business problems.

For this reason, I propose we rename intelligent software with a name like “augmented intelligence.” This would let it fit nicely with the hot field of augmented reality and better describes what we are really doing in my opinion. For example, a calculator is just augmented intelligence because humans programmed it and stored all the math calculations in it. It is not an artificially thinking device. It is just a device that augments our ability to do math. It is the same with any so called expert system, it is in reality just an application that augments our intelligence by allowing us to test a series of variables through the piece of code.

As the Web moves to a more semantic Web format, it arguably can become good enough to be called an augmented intelligence because I will be able to ask it a plain language question and get an answer. If you have not checked on the WolframAlpha website, you might take a look. This is a knowledge engine as oppose to a search engine and you will quickly see the difference. It is clear that we are moving in this direction in the construction of the Web and all the tools that are being assembled upon it.

And no, it will not become sentient. It will not become the Matrix and suddenly develop an awareness of self and want to “live.” It will just become more and more able to augment our intelligence by gathering the knowledge of millions of people and storing it in a configuration that allows anyone to access the accumulated wisdom. We will learn how to write self learning systems that will study the results of decisions the system made and will self audit rules and change what needs to be changed in order to meet quality guidelines we build in. Ergo, the applications will be able to get “smarter” on their own. What this will do is unleash a new era for humanity like we have never seen. It will give us the ability to stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before us in whole new ways. In fact, it will allow us to stand on the shoulders of software systems that will have spent years improving through repetition and observation.

In the past, we had to accumulate knowledge in books so that if could be passed down to the next generations. This sped up knowledge acquisition because at least it was all on 600 pages in one place and we did not have to redo the experiments. Now imagine a world where accumulated knowledge and wisdom is built into an application so that I do not need to even understand the underlying rules. For example, I could ask the calculator a word problem and it would do the math without me ever understanding how the math worked or even how it would have been structured to answer the word problem. I recently had an argument at an event when I said this and a teacher did not agree because she thought one had to understand the underlying “math” in order to be creative and move on. I just do not agree. I suspect the coming generations will live in a world where a piece of software augments their intelligence and they really have no idea how that software got built or what the rules are inside it.

So in order for this to become a meme, I will need all of you to start using the phrase “augmented intelligence” to describe smart systems so I can get credit for this 😉

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com