Everyday AI

A GUI has the potential to give designers a seat at the AI table–something that could be necessary to ensure the technology is used ethically and responsibly.

So we offer the intellectual exoskeleton as our closing metaphor, in which we value AI (and Big Data) for what they can contribute, but in the broader context of IA: Intelligence Augmentation.

if we buy into impersonal metaphors, they bring with them not only powerful narratives for the product pitch and news media, but lenses which desensitize, or even blinkers that blindside us to the human fingerprints all over Big Data.

Much of the power of artificial intelligence stems from its very mindlessness. Immune to the vagaries and biases that attend conscious thought, computers can perform their lightning-quick calculations without distraction or fatigue, doubt or emotion. The coldness of their thinking complements the heat of our own.

The Priority Inbox attempts to alleviate such information overload by learning a per-user statistical model of importance, and ranking mail by how likely the user is to act on that mail.

In fact, less than 0.1% of email in the average Gmail inbox is spam, and the amount of wanted mail landing in the spam folder is even lower, at under 0.05%.