Human Development and Augmented Intelligence

Abstract

Records of human civilizations date back to more than five millennia. The history of human civilization is deeply intertwined with its history of technological advancement. While humans are not alone in their ability to create tools for augmented performance, humans are the only species that create and use technology to connect minds over time and space. Hence human society has been able to advance not only through evolution, but more importantly, through learning. The twentieth century has brought a major technological breakthrough in creating machines that learn, machines that provide humans with augmented intelligence. Scientific investigations of human intelligence and human learning have inspired and benefitted from technological advances in artificial intelligence from the start of these efforts. Drawing on current studies on human development in the digital age, this talk explores how human development may be affected ontologically in the increasingly digitally connected and augmented world that we are in, and its social implications, particularly for education.