How does the structure, selection, and presentation of information affect our cognition?

As the world is charging towards replacing human minds with computers and artificial intelligence, I am more interested in using computers to restore and enhance human natural intelligence.

There is tremendous amounts of evidence that shows how the accuracy, clarity, and correctness of our thinking is deeply dependent on how information is presented to us. This means technologists have a profound responsibility to create technologies that enhance natural human intelligence instead of technologies that distort or block it. Where we can put bounds on how intelligent machine decision making can be, we have no basis for setting a limit on the bounds of natural human intelligence, when provided quality sources of information.

I have spent my career designing models and systems to help people think better and it seems clear that we are only just beginning to understand how to do this right and how far it can take humanity. I like to ask myself the following questions: How does the way information is presented affect our ability to do sensemaking and our sanity? What are the design principles for engineering powerful native human intelligence into technology? And ultimately, could we engineer technology to amplify the kind of intelligence we need to to both thrive individually, collectively, and ultimately survive as a species?

Bio

Jill Nephew is the founder of Inqwire, PBC a company on a mission to help the world make sense. The Inqwire technology is designed to enhance and accelerate human sensemaking abilities. The designing of the system required her to attempt to answer a fundamental question: how does technology interact with the mind's ability to do individual and collective sensemaking, and what are the principles that technology should follow to maximize these abilities?

Jill's background includes developing tools, platforms, and meta-data-based software languages to help people find solutions to complex, real-world problems. She developed algorithms and models in the area of constraint-based optimization, drug binding, motion control, disease kinetics, protein folding, atmospheric pollution, human articulated movement, complex fluids, and most recently sensemaking.

Projects


Inqwire is a self guided, interactive platform designed to help people make sense of their lives. It uses a one of kind model of cognition with a custom natural language processor (NLP) that allows for heuristics based machine learning and intelligent interactions that operates without the need to accumulate private and personal information from users - keeping personal information safe.

The platform is unique in providing a suite of custom interactive tools without bias, advice, diagnoses, comparisons or judgments. Inqwire is based on the latest cognitive science research that shows that each person is the ultimate authority on their lives, and they are fully capable of generating their own useful and accurate insights about themselves and the world around them.

Jill is also working on a book that came out of the research behind Inqwire. It brings together research from across disciplines to attempt to answer burning questions of our times, such as: Is there a science behind sensemaking and creating a world that makes sense? How does the way information is presented affect the quality of our decisions and even our sanity? Are our attempts to address a mental health crisis just making things worse? How much of the destruction do we see in the world stem from misunderstanding the nature of our own intelligence? Instead of cultivating intelligence we are cultivating short-sightedness? What are the factors and forces that keep us from being able to do sensemaking and how do to overcome them? What are the design principles for engineering sanity or insanity into the technologies we interact with every day? How do we engineer technology to amplify the kind of intelligence we need to become effective sensemakers and ultimately survive as a species?