Tom Gruber, a Siri co-creator who still works at Apple, gave an interesting talk for TED in April in which he discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) could make personal memory enhancement a reality and help boost our memory, work and social lives.
The full ten-minute video of the talk was released yesterday. “We are in the middle of a renaissance in AI,” he said. “Every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter.”
He’s interested in building “humanistic AI” that could help us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function, helping people remember everything they’ve ever read and the name of everyone they’ve ever met.
“What if you could remember every person you ever met, how to pronounce their name, their family details, their favorite sports, the last conversation you had with them?” Gruber asked.
“From the tiniest clue, it could help you retrieve anything you’ve ever seen or heard before. Imagine what that would do for the ability to make new connections and form new ideas.”
Here’s another interesting excerpt from his TED talk:
I believe that AI will make personal memory enhancement a reality. I can’t say when or what form factors are involved, but I think it’s inevitable, because the very things that make AI successful today—the availability of comprehensive data and the ability for machines to make sense of that data—can be applied to the data of our lives. And those data are here today, available for all of us, because we lead digitally mediated lives, in mobile and online.
Gruber knows what he’s talking about—as one of Siri’s co-creators, he’s certainly helped change our perspective on how machine intelligence could enhance interactions with our devices.