Ideas worth spreading

How AI can enhance our memory, work and social lives

2,196,794 views | Tom Gruber • TED2017

How smart can our machines make us? Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri, wants to make "humanistic AI" that augments and collaborates with us instead of competing with (or replacing) us. He shares his vision for a future where AI helps us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function -- from turbocharging our design skills to helping us remember everything we've ever read and the name of everyone we've ever met. "We are in the middle of a renaissance in AI," Gruber says. "Every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter."

How smart can our machines make us? Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri, wants to make "humanistic AI" that augments and collaborates with us instead of competing with (or replacing) us. He shares his vision for a future where AI helps us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function -- from turbocharging our design skills to helping us remember everything we've ever read and the name of everyone we've ever met. "We are in the middle of a renaissance in AI," Gruber says. "Every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter."

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Participate in the conversation about the proper role of AI in our lives. The Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society is a nonprofit organization established to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society. Gruber represents Apple on the board of this organization.

About the speaker

Tom Gruber

AI product designer

See speaker profile

As co-creator of Siri, Tom Gruber helped redefine the role of machine intelligence in our lives and transformed the way we interact with our devices.

John Markoff | Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, 2015 | Book

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

This book explores in depth how two philosophies of AI guide work in field: machine-centric AI and humanistic AI (which Markoff calls Intelligence Augmentation). He shows how this distinction is woven into the history of AI from the earliest research on robots and software, and he intelligently frames the current conversation about the implications of machine intelligence that exceeds human levels of performance.

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Douglas Engelbart, the father of human-machine collaboration

Doug Engelbart introduced the term "augmentation" in the sense that Tom uses it in this talk — using technology to help humans think and perform better. Engelbart was an early pioneer and visionary in computer science, inventing the field of human-computer collaboration, computer-supported collaborative work, the computer mouse, and the idea of augmenting people with technology to help foster collective intelligence. Doug was a major influence for team that created Siri.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Participate in the conversation about the proper role of AI in our lives. The Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society is a nonprofit organization established to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society. Gruber represents Apple on the board of this organization.