Ross Dawson

The history of humanity has been one of accelerating scientific and technological progress. Now, by amplifying the cognition and capabilities of scientists with AI, we can dramatically step up the pace of discovery. By the very nature of discovery, we cannot know what we will learn. The coming advances in life and brain sciences and […]

Soon virtually every decision will involve AI. For every decision we make, the critical first step is to determine the level of AI delegation. And then select the specific Humans + AI architecture most appropriate to the decision. This framework is the latest iteration of the AI decision-making delegation frameworks I’ve been developing and using […]

The Exploitation-Exploration dilemma is deeply relevant, not only to business strategy, but to many aspects of our lives. It is also a fundamental underpinning of intelligence, human and artificial. The dilemma is essentially: should we continue with what we have, or leave that behind to find something better? Explore-exploit’s role in intelligence The exploitation-exploration dilemma […]

Many are crying doom about the future of work. I believe that a highly prosperous future of job is possible. It is even likely, on condition we do the right things today. In order to create that future, we must believe it is possible. In this mini-report I have distilled the major arguments that a […]

I believe the media industry has a prosperous future. Today at the fabulous humAIn conference by Unmade I made that case in the concluding “debAIt”, arguing strongly against the proposition “AI is news media’s extinction level event”. What this debate really boils down to is the business models for news media. A key point beyond […]

The primary application of my Humans + AI work over the last 18 months has been in strategic decision-making, working with boards and executive teams to augment their decision-making processes and outcomes using generative AI. The other major Humans + AI application I’ve been working on is in institutional investment decision-making. I am currently shifting […]

Jorge Luis Borges has been one of my favorite authors since my teens. Over the last couple of years I have often thought of one of his masterpieces, Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote, written in 1939, which turns out to be extremely relevant to the age of AI.  The story recounts how a contemporary […]

Arguably the entire finance industry can be framed as a massive inter-related array of decisions, by both clients and financial insttutions. In this world AI wil be transformative, in most cases not by supplanting humans in the decision-making process, but in playing a role in ‘Humans + AI’ decision-making. I was recently interviewed for the […]

Since well before the advent of Generative AI,  machine learning models exceeded human forecasting performance across a whole range of specific domains. Within a bounded domain with sufficient data, machine learning is often extremely good at predicting outcomes. However, machine learning can only work within defined domains where there is sufficient data. In most real […]

Among the most important recent innovations for improving the value and reliability of Large Language Models are Chain-of-Thought and its derivatives including Tree-of-Thought and Graph-of-Thought.  These structures are also extremely valuable in designing effective Humans + AI workflows for better thinking. In this article I’ll provide a high-level view of Chain-of-Thought and then look at […]

Artifact, the news discovery app launched a year ago by the founders of Instagram, has just announced it is shutting down, saying “the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.” As pointed out in TechCrunch, Artifact “hadn’t quite defined what it wanted to be”, iterating from its initial personalized news discovery […]