Artificial intelligence research has been producing a couple of surprising results nowadays. As the target of most artificial intelligence research is to copy or reproduce somehow the human thinking the question is exciting but somehow much less studied from the other direction: what are the limits of human thinking; where are the limits of the human cognitive capabilities, what are the limits of the human communication or collaboration and how can be these limit overcome with the help of computers, algorithms or generally by IT technology.
Figure 1. positioning of machine assisted human intelligence.
I think the field is to be found in the intersection of three different areas:
1. Cognitive Science or, generally psychology and sociology should provide input regarding the limits of human communication and thinking.
2. Artificial Intelligence provides probably the best toolkit for algorithmic and IT support of the whole area.
3. Last but not least, Business Productivity is the market. The area in which the results of the field should be positioned, like thinking faster, making better and faster business decisions, communicating better, or just generally achieving more result with less effort.
Considering current trends in cloud computing and the fact that most providers like Amazon or Microsoft offers Artificial Intelligence as cloud solutions, it is not impossible that in a couple of years productive work will mean that you plug in into a cloud service of machine assisted human intelligence platform.
