Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence

Summary

This idea, proposed by Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen, explores Artificial Intelligence Augmentation (AIA) — a new field, emerging today out of a synthesis of AI and IA. Instead of building machines to replace human thinking, AIA asks: what if we used AI to expand it?

While traditional AI tries to outperform humans at tasks, and IA (Intelligence Augmentation) focuses on tools that support human thinking, AIA takes a third route. It uses the raw power of AI to help humans invent new kinds of cognitive tools — new ways of seeing, reasoning, exploring, and imagining. These tools don’t just make tasks easier; they can actually stretch the boundaries of what human minds can do.

One of the key possibilities here is a virtuous cycle: AI systems help us build better thinking tools, which in turn make us smarter and more capable of building better AI. It's not man versus machine — it’s man and machine inventing new ways of thinking, together.

This approach is less about automation and more about transformation: not speeding up what we already do, but changing what we’re even capable of thinking in the first place.

Unfortunately, many in the AI community greatly underestimate the depth of interface design, often regarding it as a simple problem, mostly about making things pretty or easy-to-use. In this view, interface design is a problem to be handed off to others, while the hard work is to train some machine learning system.This view is incorrect. At its deepest, interface design means developing the fundamental primitives human beings think and create with. This is a problem whose intellectual genesis goes back to the inventors of the alphabet, of cartography, and of musical notation, as well as modern giants such as Descartes, Playfair, Feynman, Engelbart, and Kay. It is one of the hardest, most important and most fundamental problems humanity grapples with. Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen

Key concepts

• AI + IA = AIA Artificial Intelligence Augmentation isn’t about replacing us — it’s about teaming up. combines the strengths of artificial intelligence with the goals of intelligence augmentation — using machine learning to support, extend, and evolve human cognition.
• Generative interfaces Tools that allow users to interact with the internal representations of machine learning models, fostering creativity, exploration, and new modes of reasoning.
• Redefining intelligence Rather than automating existing tasks, AIA encourages the invention of entirely new kinds of cognitive tools — ones that help humans think in ways that were previously impossible.
• The virtuous feedback loop AIA imagines a future where AI helps humans build better thinking tools, which in turn help humans create better AI — a self-reinforcing cycle of enhanced intelligence.
• From automation to transformation The real goal isn’t to do what we already do, faster. It’s to do what we couldn’t do before — to expand the landscape of human thought itself.

Artificial Intelligence Augmentation isn’t about beating humans at chess or summarizing emails — it’s about expanding the space of human thought itself, and inviting machines in as collaborators, not competitors.

This idea was originally published in the journal Distill as Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence.