Human Augmentation: partnering with Machines

Roberto Saracco February 12, 2018 Blog 1,095 Views

The iconic image of construction workers having their lunch break modified to illustrate a new era of human robot partnership. Image credit: iStart -Technology in Business

This week the IEEE Future Direction Committee will meet in Orlando to discuss progress achieved by its various initiatives and to plan future ones. This is the time to look at various forecasts on what is going to matter most in the coming years and among the ones that I found on the web I got hooked on a document, Realizing 2030: Dell Technologies Research explores the next era of Human-Machine partnership, produced by the Institute for the Future.

The document makes the point that the next decades will see a growing partnership among humans and machines: no longer machines being used as tools but machine as independent entities living in partnership with us, sharing work and … ideas!

At the core of this evolution a set of enabling technologies: artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing, robotics and virtual and augmented reality. There are plenty of other technologies that will play a role and that they have not mentioned: I was impressed by their choices. If you look at the list you basically see the tools for bestowing intelligence on machine, for having machine leveraging on that intelligence by learning, a pervasive processing, storing and communications infrastructure (the cloud) and an advanced interface where real and artefacts blend in a continuous fabric. Indeed, these are the crucial ingredient for the human machine partnership.

Interesting is also their analyses on the implication of such partnership: both individuals and organisations will be affected. We might see

the working paradigm turned upside down: no longer people looking for a job (work) but work looking for people (the Gig Economy taking the upper hand);
no more education and continuous education but just in time education (here is where VR and AR are required);
emerging need for digital conductors to orchestrate the partnership into an effective set of coordinated actions.

There are a number of similarities in this forecast with the ideas that are emerging in the IEEE FDC Symbiotic Autonomous Systems initiative: in this latter the partnership is seen, also, as giving rise to augmented humans and augmented machines, each leveraging on the other sometimes in a seamless way forming a novel superorganism. Think about the seamless integration of a smart prosthetic limb.