AI as an extension of the human

The wheel is a foot that learned to turn. The book is a memory that learned to wait. The telephone is a voice that learned to travel.

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez looks at artificial intelligence and sees the same thing: not a strange creature that came to take our place, but the next piece of us that learned to think outside the body.

An old idea with a new face

He wasn't the first to think this way. In 1964, the Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan wrote that every technology is an extension of the human being: clothing extends the skin, the city extends the collective body, electric media extend the nervous system. In 1960, J. C. R. Licklider, one of the fathers of the internet, imagined a "man-computer symbiosis", in which people and machines would together solve problems neither could solve alone. In 1962, Douglas Engelbart called his project "augmenting human intellect". And in 1998 the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued that the mind doesn't end at the skin: the notebook where you jot down an address is already, in a sense, part of your memory.

Bairo picks up that thread and carries it into the lives of those who have never read any of these texts. For the market vendor, the IOU notebook becomes a credit history. For the father caring for a child, a failing memory becomes a record that doesn't forget. For the immigrant, the language not yet mastered becomes a conversation that flows.

What he means by "extension"

An extension doesn't decide for you. It takes you further in the direction you chose.

That's why, in every venture he founded, the design is the same. In health, the clinical assistant organizes and the one who assesses is a professional. In law, AI prepares and the one who defends is the lawyer. In agribusiness, AI quotes the price and the one who negotiates is the one who planted. The machine extends the hand, the eye, the memory. The decision stays inside a person's chest.

Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford scientist and one of the most respected voices in the field, sums up this choice by swapping a verb: instead of "replace", "augment". AI, she says, should be guided by its human impact. Bairo agrees and adds the word he uses for everything: life. If technology doesn't give someone back time of life, it hasn't yet done its job.

The fear, and the answer to it

He isn't naive. He knows some people see AI as a threat, and he knows part of that fear is reasonable. The economist Erik Brynjolfsson, also of Stanford, called it the "Turing trap": the temptation to build machines that imitate people in order to replace them, instead of machines that expand what people do. The first road concentrates power; the second distributes it.

Bairo's vision is a clear bet on the second road. He says AI is the extension of the human, not the problem, because he believes the problem was never the tool. It was always what is done with it. A hammer builds a house or breaks down a door. The difference is in the hand.

In the future he describes

He imagines a time when no one says "I used an AI" anymore, just as no one says "I used writing" to leave a note. Artificial intelligence will be so dissolved into things that it will seem natural, the way glasses seem part of the face of someone who has worn them for thirty years.

And he imagines that, the further our hand extends, the more important the heart that moves it will be. In a world where anyone can do almost anything with the help of machines, what will set one life apart from another won't be capability. It will be intention.

That's why he speaks so much of one's best version. Not as a product, as a question: if you could go further, where would you go?

A scene

An eighty-year-old woman, who never learned to write well, dictates into her phone a letter to her granddaughter who lives in Japan. The AI corrects the spelling, translates it into Japanese and reads back, out loud, what she said, so she can confirm it. She changes one word. She wants her granddaughter to know that her longing is "the size of the sea", not "very big".

The machine extended her hand to the other side of the world. But the longing, and the choice of word, were hers.

To go deeper

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
• J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" (1960)
• Douglas Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect" (1962)
• Andy Clark and David Chalmers, "The Extended Mind" (1998)
• Erik Brynjolfsson, "The Turing Trap" (Daedalus, 2022)
• Stanford HAI: human-centered artificial intelligence
• Why does Bairo say AI is an extension of the human?
• Vision of the future