Bengaluru: Would you hire a superhuman who has enhanced his ability using artificial intelligence? Majority of the CEOs believe that augmented humans could soon be a reality, and are also open to hire such talent.
‘Augmented Humans’, as per Gartner is when some people – sometime in future – might opt to use technological body implants to acquire abilities beyond what is natural for a human.
The announcement comes even as Elon Musk plans to announce an important update from his company Neuralink – that’s trying to understand whats really going on in the brain and sort of enable it to incorporate artificial intelligence to attain superhuman intelligence.
The result of cognitive augmentation – which includes some technology in the brain augmentation category – for example will enhance a person’s ability to think and make better decisions, achieved through exploiting information and applications to enhance learning or new experiences.
In its annual CEO Survey 2020 which it termed as the Year of Recession, Gartner asked more than 400 global CEOs and senior business executives if they would be hiring for augmented human abilities and a majority of 59 per cent answered in the affirmative, while about 19 per cent said they were not aware of it.
Physical augmentation could either be sensory augmentation (hearing, vision, perception), appendage and biological function augmentation (exoskeletons, prosthetics), brain augmentation (implants to treat seizures) and genetic augmentation (somatic gene and cell therapy).
Human augmentation
For example, the automotive or mining industries use wearables to improve worker safety. In other industries, such as retail and travel, wearables are used to increase worker productivity.
“The technology is still part of fiction, but a large majority of CEO’s were open to the idea of hiring the ‘people of the future,” Mark Ruskino, a Gartner Fellow in the CEO and Digital Business Leadership research team said.
Gartner last year identified human augmentation as one of the key trends in 2020.
The 2020 CEO survey which was conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic set in also indicates some key trends that are quite significant, looking at the situation that has evolved over the past few months.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is all set to reveal the latest updates of his brain-machine interface company Neuralink.
Tesla’s Neuralink
The company wants to develop a high-bandwidth, implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) and it wants to do it by the end of this year. That’s where the Friday’s announcement becomes significant.
Neuralink which was founded in 2016 is trying to develop a system for recording the activity of thousands of neurons in the brain.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX had announced about the update in a tweet in July.
Speaking during the Lex Fridman Podcast in July Musk had said that “Neurolink will definitely put a lot of information on how the brain works. Right now we have very limited information… In order to really know what’s going on in the brain we need to have high precession sensors that tell you what individual neurons are doing, and being able to trigger neurons to see what the response is in the brain, so you can see the consequences.”
“Wait until you see the next version vs what was presented last year. It’s awesome,” he wrote in February.