We Must Find a Grand Purpose for AI

I met with Satya Nadella on the morning of April 20, 2017. I had come up to Microsoft to interview Satya for my forthcoming book, WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, but so much of what I wanted to discuss was already in Satya's own brilliant memoir, Hit Refresh. We have a shared optimism about technology, and a shared conviction that the challenge of Artificial Intelligence is to define for ourselves and for society what is truly human, and to build a world in which AI reinforces and augments human capability and experience rather than devaluing it. So that's where we started our conversation Tim: One of the things you said in your book is that the challenge will be to define the grand, inspiring social purpose for which AI is destined. You wrote: "In 1969, when President Kennedy committed America to landing on the moon, the goal was chosen in a large part due to the immense technical challenge it posed and the global collaboration it demanded. In a similar fashion, we need to set a goal for AI that is sufficiently bold and ambitious, one that goes beyond anything that can be achieved through incremental improvements to current technology." I love that thought, and I wonder if you could expand on it. Satya: If you start with the assumption that AI's benefits have to be about augmenting human capability – if I even look at the place where even Microsoft's own engineers are most passionate, most driven about using AI – it is in assistive technology.