The complementary strengths of AI and human intelligence

When the pandemic forced millions of people into working and collaborating remotely, it not only caused an explosion in the use and development of new technologies for productive and effective collaboration, it also made many of us more aware than ever of how technologies can enhance our thinking and creativity. At Nesta's Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, our work rests upon the premise that human intelligence combined with machine intelligence is more powerful than either in isolation. When these are successfully combined, it is known as collective intelligence. Our Grants Programme awarded funding to 15 different teams around the world that designed experiments to explore and test this idea in new ways to help tackle pressing social and environmental challenges. Each experiment fell under one of four themes: exploring artificial intelligence (AI)-crowd interaction; making better collective decisions; understanding the dynamics of collective behaviour; and gathering better data.