Beyond AI

Using games to create human-machine intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field in rapid development and there is almost daily news reports about how AI has revolutionized yet another industrial domain. Some researchers claim that within a few decades we will reach a so-called singularity in which computer intelligence will surpass human capabilities in all domains. Other AI-researchers, however, maintain that we have still far from understood the human ability to reach fast, intuitive and correct decisions based on often seemingly too little data. They believe that the future job market will rely heavily on such insights in developing hybrid forms of human-machine intelligence.

In the scienceathome.org project, we have developed games allowing so far 250,000 players to contribute to research in quantum and classical physics, mathematics, chemistry, behavioral economics, corporate management, psychology and cognitive science. We believe that this wealth of data from human individual and collective problem solving holds the key to understanding and further exploiting human uniqueness.

Apart from AI, the digital 21st century also poses a democratic challenge through the increasing concentration of large data sets of human behavior among a few high-tech companies. As a response, we have recently launched a game-based effort aimed at cognitively profiling a large portion of the world’s population and making the dataset available for open scientific research. In a future, where knowledge is power, we believe that the best possible society can only created if we achieve equality in the access to knowledge of human behavior.