AI’s cyborg problem: you have to embrace it to really succeed but 90% of people can’t or don’t want to

A few weeks ago, I became briefly famous for the wrong reasons. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about how I use AI in my work as an editor at Fortune — prompting drafts, synthesizing interviews, and accelerating a reporting process that used to take me twice as long. The response was swift, loud, and chaotic. The “journalism community” was divided as editors perked up and reporters recoiled. Strangers on the internet called me lazy. A few journalists told me privately they were doing the same thing and would never admit it. One reader asked to meet for coffee specifically to explain why I was wrong. I had not expected this. I had expected, maybe, curiosity. What I got instead felt like something older and more personal than a debate about journalism ethics — more like the look you get when a coworker figures out a shortcut and doesn’t share it. I’ve been trying to understand the reaction ever since. The person who finally gave me a framework for it wasn’t a media critic or a journalism professor. She was a neuroscientist who has spent 30 years wiring AI into human beings. The experiment Vivienne Ming‘s career began in 1999, when her undergraduate honors thesis — a facial analysis system trained to distinguish real smiles from fake ones, which she proudly told me was partly funded by the CIA for lie-detection research — introduced her to machine learning before most people had even heard the term. She went on to build one of the first learning AI systems embedded in a cochlear implant, a model that learned to hear within a human brain that was also learning to hear. She has since founded companies applying AI to hiring bias, Alzheimer’s research, and postpartum depression. For three decades, her self-appointed mission has been to take a technology most people misunderstand and figure out how to use it to make the world better. courtesy of Vivienne Ming Last year, she ran an experiment that got a lot of attention for what