Workers in professions ranging from software engineering to medicine can plan to benefit from human amplification—the coupling of human intelligence with technology—within the next five years, Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist and LinkedIn founder, told the audience at Fortune’s Brainstorm A.I. summit in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Hoffman, a partner with venture capital institution Greylock, shared the stage with Saam Motamedi, another partner at Greylock, and Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn. Central to their conversation was Inflection, a machine learning startup co-founded by Hoffman. Inflection focuses on improving interactions between humans and computers by enabling A.I. systems to understand "natural language" instructions from human users—effectively allowing those users to amplify their own abilities.
Hoffman said that Inflection sees itself as a “co-pilot” to human professionals rather than a replacement. “[Human amplification] doesn’t put graphic designers out of business," he said. "It becomes the new essential tool by which we do everything.”
