Michael Bernstein on What A.I. Can Do for Us

My basic contention is that the things that make AI truly transformative is not when it sort of replaces parts of what we do. That's frankly, to me, less interesting, more boring. What's much more interesting is when it gives us superpowers. How does it make me smarter, more strategic, faster, skills I didn't know I had? Picture sort of Neo in The Matrix, you know, jacked in and say, ah, I know kung fu. Suddenly you can do things that you couldn't do before, right? That's what we call intelligence augmentation in the research literature. It's essentially a point of view that says, well, pry this out of my cold dead hands, right? You've given me some power I don't otherwise have. So how can agentic AI give me superpowers? How can it sort of be something that tells me, helps me answer questions or know things I could never otherwise know or answer?