Why the need to augment humans? Because although humans possess great assets and strengths such as creativity, insight, problem solving skills, and wisdom, humans also ncompass serious liabilities such as being error prone, sensory limited, and employing selective mental processes, the least effective of which contribute to unrecognized cognitive biases.

Augmented cognition is an emerging field of research that seeks to extend a human's abilities via computational technologies that were explicitly designed to address bottlenecks, imitations and biases in cognition. These include physiological and cognitive limitations in attention, perception, memory, learning, comprehension, visualization, and complex decision-making. Human cognition limitations are due primarily to intrinsic restrictions in the number of mental tasks that a person can execute at one time, and this capacity itself may fluctuate from moment to moment depending on a host of factors including mental fatigue, novelty, boredom and stress.