Get Together in the Middle-earth: A First Step towards Hybrid Intelligence Systems

In the last decade, the number of computer systems using AI has increased dramatically. To date, indeed, AI is present in almost all the aspects of the human everyday life. This resulted in the attempt of scholars in Computer Science to endow machines with human-like socio-cognitive skills and/or human-like embodiment to try to improve interactions. Such an approach, however, highlights several crucial issues related to the substantial differences between fine-grained human skills and what machines can do and learn. So, although being expensive and sophisticated tools, machines tend to be "idiots savants". Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is aimed to tackle this issue by proposing, as Akata and colleagues say, "systems that operate as mixed teams, where humans and machines cooperate synergistically, proactively, and purposefully to achieve shared goals". To our knowledge, however, HI is at a very early exploratory stage, and few concrete solutions to deal with it exist. In this position paper we introduce and briefly describe "Middle-Earth", a conceptual and experimental ground to study HI. Moreover, we present a first prototype of a software platform based on immersive VR environments, on which we plan to carry out in the future the first pioneering experiments on teams of humans and/or AI-driven agents getting together in Middle Earth to perform collaborative tasks.