The complementary strengths of AI and human intelligence
When the pandemic forced millions of people into working and collaborating remotely, it not only caused an explosion in the use and development of new technologies for productive and effective collaboration, it also made many of us more aware than ever of how technologies can enhance our thinking and creativity.
At Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, our work rests upon the premise that human intelligence combined with machine intelligence is more powerful than either in isolation. When these are successfully combined, it is known as collective intelligence. Our Grants Programme awarded funding to 15 different teams around the world that designed experiments to explore and test this idea in new ways to help tackle pressing social and environmental challenges.
Each experiment fell under one of four themes: exploring artificial intelligence (AI)-crowd interaction; making better collective decisions; understanding the dynamics of collective behaviour; and gathering better data.
The first group of grantees looked at ways in which AI can complement human crowd intelligence. This theme included experiments such as one by medtech Spotlab, which used serious games to train AI models for medical diagnosis. It asked if citizens playing online games could be as effective as physicians in training AI models for diagnosing neglected tropical diseases, such as malaria. The experiment found that AI models trained on images annotated by both adults and schoolchildren can obtain similar results to ones trained on physician-based annotations, of around 93% accuracy. Meanwhile, AI startup Samurai Labs grappled with how humans and AIs might work together to moderate online spaces and reduce cyber violence – and discovered that sometimes machine creativity can outperform the human variety.
This second group of grantees explored how technology can be used to improve decision-making within groups by communicating opinion diversity. The University of Bristol built a swarm of robots to test whether they could help a crowd to reach an inclusive and informed consensus on challenging (and often polarising) topics such as climate change. Participants input their responses to a question into the robot, which the robot then displayed for other participants to see before they responded to the same question. It showed that robot swarms can be used to engage people on challenging topics, to diffuse and influence opinions, serve as a prompt to launch conversations, and empower introverts to share their opinions in large group of people.
The third group of grantees looked into ways in which positive behaviours and collective action can spread, and be encouraged, within and between groups. Urban design studio Umbrellium tested whether residents in a London borough could be connected together to collectively make environmentally friendly lifestyle changes to reduce air pollution – even though the direct individual effects of these actions might not be immediately noticeable. It found that communication and collaboration among citizens led to the sustained adoption of these actions to decrease air pollution.
