JOHANNES GUTTENBERG INVENTED THE printing press in the mid-1400s. The first computers were being developed more than 100 years ago. The public has had access to the World Wide Web for 30 years. Phones could unlock with a fingerprint, then a facial scan. Now, artificial intelligence creates music, generates art, writes essays, and engages in conversation with its users. Technological innovation has demonstrated exponential growth, and it’s time to evaluate where this growth is headed.

Tao Gao doesn’t subscribe to streaming services. He doesn’t like the aggregation of his personal data. It’s not an issue about technology itself but how streaming companies use technology to collect his personal information to capitalize off him.

Gao, jointly appointed to the departments of statistics, communication, and psychology at UCLA, is an assistant professor and researcher with an academic background in psychology. His involvement with artificial intelligence began with a desire to replicate human behavior through machines. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Yale, where he took an interest in cognitive modeling. “We have some idea of how the human mind works,” Gao said in an interview, “[and] we want to build an engineering system so that we can mimic the human mind.”

He described the process of building these models as “reverse engineering.” After creating a model of the human mind, he gave a human and the model the same tasks. If they succeeded or failed in similar ways, he said, “The model really captured how the human mind works.”