Enhancement and assessment in the AI age: An extended mind perspective

On the verge of the AI Age—the Mechanocene—we tend to reproduce past narratives where humans are replaced by machines. This leads us to identifying skills and activities that will not be automated by AI soon, and prepare both current and future generations for those ‘safe’ occupations. However, there is the risk that the set of non-automatable tasks becomes empty sooner than expected, preparing new generations for skills that will not be needed in the end. Instead of this incremental route, in this paper we imagine a final destination where AI has all the skills humans have. We argue that in an age where humans can be intensively assisted, augmented and coupled with AI, we need to rethink enhancement and assessment under the extended mind thesis—a philosophical theory suggesting that technological tools can become integral parts of our cognitive processes. Under this perspective, we can still identify skills that are useful in this AI age, especially if humans want to understand and influence their world. Then, if these skills are set as the goals for education, we need to reliably assess they are achieved. However, a world of ubiquitous AI extenders generates enormous challenges for the assessment of individuals, when humans will be mostly operating as part of AI-human hybrids and collectives. In this context, the skills of the individual, human or machine, must be evaluated in terms of their contribution to the human-machine teams they are expected to be embedded in. This further takes education and assessment from the traditional aspiration of achieving fully autonomous skills to the reality of more integrated and interdependent human-machine scenarios of the AI age.