Will machines make humans smarter or just more dependent on our calculators, car navigators, and kitchen conveniences? Dr. Ken Ford of the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition reclassifies several key problems in developing smarter machines into a category called “Amplified Intelligence.”

His Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Human & Machine Cognition is involved in “building cognitive prostheses, computational systems that leverage and extend human intellectual capacities, just as eyeglasses are a kind of ocular prosthesis. Building cognitive prostheses is fundamentally different from AI’s traditional Turing Test ambitions — it doesn’t set out to imitate human abilities, but to extend them.”