Augmented Human Intelligence: Empowering Minds in the Age of AI

A clear-eyed look at what AI actually is-and why we must focus on AI systems that augment human cognition, rather than mimic it. From a seasoned AI researcher and a VC investor and entrepreneur. Augmented Human Intelligence cuts through all the hype and noise around AI by returning to a central, often overlooked question: What is intelligence actually for?Rather than aiming to build autonomous superintelligent agents, AI leaders Erik Larson and Chee-We Ng argue in this book that we should focus on systems that support and extend human judgment, understanding, and decision-making-capacities that the current AI largely ignores. Most state-of-the-art models rely on statistical induction at scale.They generate text, recognize patterns, and predict outcomes with remarkable speed-but without any grasp of meaning, consequence, or purpose.The authors of this book contend this is not merely a technical limitation, but a conceptual one: intelligence is not pattern-matching alone.It emerges from