Democratization of Expertise : How Cognitive Systems Will Revolutionize Your Life

We create technology enabling us to do things never before possible and it ultimately changes the way we live, work, play, and interact with each other. Throughout human history, the democratization of technology making a technology available to the masses, has brought about sweeping cultural, social, political, and societal changes. In the last half-century, the democratization of computers, information, the Internet, and social media have revolutionized and transformed our lives. We now stand at the beginning of a new era sure to bring about waves of new revolutions, the cognitive systems era. Until now, humans have done all of the thinking. However, our lives are about to be infused with artificial entities capable of performing high-level cognitive processing previously possible only in the human mind. Systems capable of this kind of "synthetic cognition" will achieve and surpass the level of human experts in almost every field of endeavor. Far from replacing humans, these cognitive systems will be our collaborators, teachers, confidants, colleagues, and companions. The future will belong to those who can better partner with these cognitive systems. Made available to the average person via the Internet, handheld devices, and through ordinary objects all around us, expertise will become democratized. Everything will change when anyone has access to expertise in any field and new things will be possible. The democratization of expertise is the foundation on which our society’s revolutions will be built over the next half-century. This book discusses societal and cultural revolutions throughout history brought about by the adoption of new technology and gives brief histories of human cognitive augmentation and artificial intelligence. In the coming cognitive systems era, humans, by collaboratively partnering with cognitive systems, will together achieve expert-level performance—synthetic expertise—with humans performing some of the cognitive processing and cognitiv