Author Keywords HCI vision; human-augmentation; human-AI integration HUMAN-AUGMENTATION Neo: Can you fly that thing? In the movie "The Matrix," Trinity responds to Neo right before having the helicopter's maneuverability downloaded Will such a future come? The idea that technology enhances humanity has a long history. "There may be found many Mechanical Inventions to improve GUIs were tools to realize that goal. In that regard, J.C.R. Licklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis" [12] is worth reviewing. Here, symbiosis means "living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms.

In the twenty-first century, AI techniques have experienced a massive surge in interest following concurrent advances in computer power, large amounts of data, and theoretical understanding. Companies are focused on it, Google has rebuilt their software around it, and Mark Zuckerberg personally hires and pays AI engineers seven figure salaries right out of graduate school. AI is simply the hottest area in technology. But, what exactly is AI, and how can it impact your investments? These are the questions we will try to explore in this week's newsletter.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post.

Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post (it's in Japanese language, so I can't find it to link to it). First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby", Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese", Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style." By contrast, Google's translation -- despite some "small unnaturalness" -- reads to him as "more transparent". The second half of Rekimoto's post examined the service in the other direction, from Japanese to English.

Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce.

Alex Tabarrok draws my attention to an article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. It's about machine learning in general, but it starts out with this: Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.