ABSTRACT
When something becomes available to the average person, we say it has become democratized. Throughout history, technology and knowledge once accessible only to the elite in society has become available to the masses. Every time it happens, mass adoption of new technology brings about cultural, social, political, and legal changes. We are now entering the “cognitive systems era” in which access to cognitive systems technology will change everything. Millions, even billions, of people will routinely work with and collaborate with cognitive systems capable of performing expert-level cognitive processing. The resulting human cognitive augmentation will enable average people to perform at, or above, the level of a human expert in a domain of discourse—synthetic expertise. Just as computer and Internet technology has changed us over recent decades, the mass adoption of cognitive systems technology and synthetic expertise will lead to changes in how we live, work, play and even what we know and believe.
