As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Pulkit Singh loved thinking about intelligence and how humans experience the world. She dabbled in philosophy, visual arts, and computer science, each field granting her a new way to think about the mind. During a study abroad program in Edinburgh, UK, Singh took a computational cognitive science class and knew she'd found her niche. She'd been fascinated by the brain but couldn't see herself becoming a biologist in the lab. And although she loved computer algorithms, she hadn't thought about how human and machine intelligence could benefit each other.

Prof. Tom Griffiths is the director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at UC Berkeley. He studies human cognition and is involved with the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence. I asked him for insight into the intersection of cognitive science and AI. He offers his thoughts on the historical interaction of the fields and what aspects of human cognition might be relevant to developing AI in the future.

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favourite book of 2011, and has been translated into ten languages. He is the coauthor, with Tom Griffiths, of Algorithms to Live By, available Spring 2016. The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. He has just released his latest book, Algorithms to Live By. Co-written with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths, the book offers a fascinating exploration of how computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind.