New research published in an article in the journal Science proposes a future wherein problem solving on massive scale — for example, solving the problem of curing certain devastating diseases, like Alzheimer’s — is handled by large numbers of human beings and artificial intelligences working on small related tasks in tandem.
According to Discovery, human computation is the name for the emerging idea that assigning thousands of human volunteers to work separately with computers on small elements of a larger problem. It is also sometime called crowd computing.
The research indicates that effectively combining computer intelligence with human intelligence, in the form of human computation, has the potential to lead to efficient and effective problem solving on planetary scale. Issues like disease, climate change, and geopolitical strife are cited as massive, wide reaching problems that might better be solved by humans and artificial intelligence working together.
While some tasks are better left to computers — computation and data parsing as obvious examples — even the most advanced artificial intelligence fails to live up to the human brain in certain respects.
One proposed idea involves A.I. management of crowd-based inputs combined into multidimensional collaborative networks.
Here’s how it might work: one small part of a task is sent to one person via their computer. They would do their part and indicate the task as completed. Their task would be processed by the A.I. management, more quickly than would be possible by a human, and then sent to the next human volunteer for the next task.
Researchers from the Human Computation Institute and Cornell University cite in the article multiple occurrences of this new breed of human computation already being utilized. For example, the authors cite an Alzheimer’s research project which utilizes this form of human computation, which could potentially reduce the time it might take to discover an effective treatment from decades to years.