The most important problems of our day involve interdisciplinary challenges. No one person has all the required expertise and this creates gaps in knowledge, communication barriers, misidentifying the true nature of problems, and the risks of interrupting existing workflows. Part of the future of work will involve building the AI tools that do the low-level tasks, so that we augment peoples ability to work at the high level of putting pieces together in new ways and adapting to the environment. In psychology, this is referred to as fluid intelligence - and it is valuable in solving problems within fields and across fields. In my own work, I have built systems that show how computation and AI can support people’s fluid intelligence in the entire iterative design workflow. There is always a backup approach for when AI fails, and the AI is giving constant feedback to the people running the workflow to control its direction. These systems are a concrete instance of how AI can do low-level tasks in a workflow and thus augment our ability to think fluidly and adapt.

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