CONCEPT
Intelligence Amplification
Morozov's preferred alternative to artificial intelligence — using technology to make human decision-makers smarter rather than to replace them, drawing on Engelbart's augmentation tradition against the replacement paradigm.
Intelligence amplification (IA) names a design orientation that treats technology as a tool for enhancing human judgment rather than substituting for it. Morozov has repeatedly contrasted IA with AI in the contemporary sense, arguing that the choice between them is not merely technical but political — a choice between tools that strengthen democratic deliberation and tools that bypass it. The term has roots in Douglas Engelbart's 1960s work on the augmentation of human intellect, which Morozov has recovered as the neglected alternative to the replacement paradigm that dominates contemporary AI.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction between augmentation and automation is not new to the AI discourse. Engelbart's framework, developed in the 1960s, explicitly distinguished technologies that remove humans from the loop (automation) from technologies that redesign the loop to make human participation more powerful (augmentation). The two design orientations produce different tools, different dependencies, and different distributions of cognitive labor.
Morozov's recovery of the IA tradition serves a specific political