Frank van Harmelen on how humans and machines can successfully work together

Since 2020, he has been director of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre researching AI systems for the future. 'Hybrid intelligence is all about successful collaboration between humans and machines, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.'

For me, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most exciting field in computing. Its history can be described as a kind of rollercoaster ride of great expectations and ambitions that culminated in both failures and wonderful discoveries. Some developments went faster than expected, others much slower. In the 1960s, for instance, American researchers confidently predicted that a computer could beat the world chess champion within five years. It finally succeeded only in 1997, almost 40 years later. But that was not yet the AI as we know it today.

In the 1980s, research mainly focused on developing expert systems to support human specialists, such as doctors in making diagnoses. These models were manually programmed with thousands of decision rules, often with direct input from experts. Today, we work on a much larger scale and have systems with hundreds of millions of rules and huge medical databases, based on which AI can provide advice. At the same time, machine learning broke through in recent decades. In this, you don't input rules but AI learns to discover patterns on its own. Then you give the computer large amounts of examples, for example patient records, and then it learns by itself which drugs work for which diseases. So today there are two schools of AI: the knowledge-based approach, with millions of explicit rules, and machine learning, where computers learn from examples without instructions. The challenge now lies in merging these two approaches, which is complicated in practice by differences in the underlying mathematics and methodology.