Human and Machine Intelligence

The year after his defeat by Deep Blue, Kasparov set out to see what would happen if he paired a machine and a human chess player in a collaboration. Like a centaur, the hybrid would have the strength of each of its components: the processing power of a large logic circuit and the intuition of a human brain’s wetware. The result: human-machine teams, even when they didn’t include the best grandmasters or most powerful computer systems, consistently beat teams composed solely of human grandmasters or superfast machines. Humans will find themselves working in partnership with the progeny of these supercomputers to diagnose diseases, solve crimes, write poetry and become (as the clever double meaning of the book’s title puts it) smarter than we think. The use of digital devices and social networks helps to facilitate collaborative creativity and an ambient awareness of what’s happening in the world, while reducing the need to perform simple memory tasks.What are your thoughts?