Humans in the Loop: The Design of Interactive AI Systems

I was once asked by a colleague in the Philosophy Department here at Stanford if robot musicians will ever exist, to which I replied that they may -- someday -- but only if we first figure out what it means to have robot philosophers. The exchange was admittedly a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it revealed a blind-spot in the way we talk about the future of AI: in our tendency to ask whether or when a given task will be taken over by automation, it is easy to ignore the deeper issue of what such a takeover would mean. We're less concerned with how these tasks are accomplished, and more concerned with the outcome -- generally measured in cost, speed and safety. But when we imagine "automating" a pursuit like music making, we're forced to balance the product of work with something deeper -- the meaning we derive from the process of doing it. Of course, automation is only accelerating in the age of AI, and it's natural to ask how far it will go.