[CAnet - news] The death of intuition - Web 2.0 computing and networks

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http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
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[Excerpts from Economist Book Review-- BSA]


http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9795019&CFID=248209
72&CFTOKEN=14211126

Automated decision-making
The death of expertise

EVERY time a world-class chess player loses to a computer, humans die a
little. In this book Ian Ayres, a professor of law and management at Yale
University, explains how in many less high-profile endeavours, human
intuition and flair are more easily beaten. The sheer quantity of data and
the computer power now available make it possible for automated processes to
surpass human experts in fields as diverse as rating wines, writing film
dialogue and choosing titles for books.

The author originally intended to call his book "The end of intuition". He
changed his mind after a Google AdWords campaign which randomly chose which
of two advertisements for the book to display: "Super Crunchers" garnered
63% more clicks than his original choice. He tells of credit card companies
that are using similar randomised trials to see which combination of offers
and advertising make for the most successful mailshots.

Even the occasional government is accepting that properly analysed data
trump ideological conviction. Mr Ayres sings the praises of Mexico's
Progresa/Oportunidades programme, which gave assistance to poor people only
if their children attended health clinics and schools. It was tried out on
506 randomly selected villages. The results were so convincing that the
programme was expanded 100-fold despite a change of government.

Mr Ayres predicts that automated decision-making will soon see other
professional jobs going the same way as that of the bank-loan officer, once
well-paid and responsible and now a mere call-centre operative, paid peanuts
to parrot the words a computer prompts. Doctors will have to face up to the
fact that computers can diagnose illnesses better than they can, and
teachers will find that although their presence is needed to engage their
pupils, their professional judgment often is not. When teaching small
children to read, for example, tightly scripted lessons, their exact content
and timing honed by randomised trials, do best.

This book does not touch on what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "Black Swans":
rare events that are unpredictable with or without crunching numbers. But it
presents a convincing and disturbing vision of a future in which everyday
decision-making is increasingly automated, and the role of human judgment
restricted to providing input to formulae.


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