Held on 2 March 2023

Centaurs and the Future of AI

It's been a year of revolutionary advancements: computers can now write business letters (GPT-3), create photos and drawings (DALL-E), and hold a conversation (Chat-GPT). The underlying technology is being used all over in less obvious ways, to write software and recognise faces and even for psychotherapy. It may seem that machines are about to take over, that there's nothing left for humans to do.

But these innovations aren't sui generis—we've been here before, in many fields where computers today perform tasks that Turing and von Neumann couldn't have imagined: running factories, simulating fantasy worlds, planning driving routes. And in each case, the "human in the loop" has been a key element of the solution, not a useless appendage. Think of grocery-store self-scanning checkouts or the map app on your phone: we don't blindly trust the machine, we attach ourselves to it and guide and check its actions, forming what chessplayers call a "centaur", a human-computer hybrid. The skills and behaviours needed to birth, train, and manage these centaurs are different from what we needed to run teams of knowledge workers, which means you need to upgrade your hiring, operations, and strategy—but don't close down your call centre or development team just yet.

Join me on this free livestream and learn how these changes are going to affect your business this year:

Why the history of chess computers encapsulates the evolution of machine "intelligence" and how humans interact with it.
How to think about the apparent sentience of chatbots, which are actually "method actors".
What my best clients are doing to create flocks of centaurs that stay well ahead of the evolution of AI, in industries from construction to customer service.