Machine Intelligence + Human Intelligence
Platforms are more than just businesses though. To see their true revolutionary nature, we need to see them within the context of combinatorial evolution and the possibility that humans are becoming parts in some new whole. We’ve long used corporations and other forms of organization to coordinate learning and work. But the massive scale of platforms and our deepening connection to them represent something qualitatively different: a new synthesis of machine intelligence and human intelligence.
What I mean by the “machine intelligence” of platforms is the intelligence embedded in their automation. It’s no longer just software developers coding systems and letting them run. These systems are increasingly learning on their own by interacting with us. The nature of this machine intelligence is ruthless efficiency, enormous scalability, and unerring precision. Machines are also tireless, and they bring all of these qualities into their “partnership” with us.
The human intelligence embedded in the platforms takes many forms but boils down to what we refer to as subjective awareness, experience, or consciousness. Behind this statement is a set of ideas that we need to grasp if we are to understand our future with machines.
Embedding Human Intelligence in Machines
We could view our relationship with technology in terms of a parent teaching a child, for we are constantly teaching technology what we know. The teaching process takes many forms, but all entail some form of converting tacit human knowledge into explicit knowledge so that it can be embedded into technology. “Tacit knowledge,” is that which subjective human experience can know. “Explicit knowledge” is the subset of what we know that we can actually articulate. So, when we teach technology, we are really explaining what we know in such a way that it can be held in an artifact outside of a human mind.
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