Super Crunchers and The End of Intuition!

Here is a review of the book, "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart" by Ian Ayres from The Economist:

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 endeavors, 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 randomized trials to see which combination of offers and advertising make for the most successful mail shots.

Even the occasional government is accepting that properly analyzed 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 randomized 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.