Futurist Tim O'Reilly sees a human-computer symbiosis bigger than AI ZDNet

Tim O'Reilly is a kind of bard of technology, a lyrical poet of computing's past, present and future. Ask him a question and whole paragraphs of reflection bubble up. Is the present state of artificial intelligence, for example, bigger than the open-source software revolution, an epochal development chronicled in detail from the front lines by O'Reilly's publishing company? "That's an interesting question," says O'Reilly, before re-framing it, declaring that there is something bigger than AI itself. "I think in the long run, this transformation to machine autonomy, and to, basically, machines that are in a new kind of hybrid existence with humans -- they talk about AI as separate from us, but all interesting machines are hybrids of human and machine -- we have this machine that has been amplifying things we can do, and I think of the human-machine symbiosis as a trend that is probably bigger than the internet, and bigger than open source, and of which AI is one manifestation."