From artificial to augmented intelligence

Joe McKendrick, Why AI Should rightfully Mean Augmented Intelligence, Not Artificial Intelligence, Forbes, 29 June 2019:

Perhaps "artificial" is too artificial of a word for the AI equation. Augmented intelligence describes the essence of the technology in a more elegant and accurate way.

AI has been around for some time, and Dr. David Bray, executive director of the People-Centered Internet, sees the current "third wave" of AI as a convergence of neural networks, deep learning, pattern matching, Internet of Things, and scaling tasks beyond human limitations. AI's power and potential arises from pairing humans and machines, so that "the human is learning from the machine and, at the same time, the machine is learning from the human. Together, you're getting better outcomes from them both."

Corporate culture must change:

Many enterprises are still mired in not only legacy technologies that hold them back from achieving this new reality, but also legacy corporate culture as well, Bray cautions. "Legacy technologies can become a source of ossification for an organization -- not just because they're old and falling behind in terms of technology capability, but because organizations often instantiate their processes in their legacy technologies. If that process itself needs to change, just moving to a newer technology and not changing that process will pull the organization further behind."

Before technology can have an impact, organizations themselves must evolve to new thinking about their corporate cultures. "We organized in the past with hierarchies," Bray says. "Hierarchies are absolutely the wrong thing to have for this type of environment, because they're very good at efficiency and repetition across the different organizational units, but that's the last thing you want. You want things to be fluid and adapt as necessary, of which a hierarchy is not conducive."

Cf. Beyond "AI" – toward a new engineering discipline.