People and computers are coming together in all kinds of interesting ways these days. The right combination of human and digital smarts in chess will beat the top grandmaster, the best chess supercomputer, and the top grandmaster with the best supercomputer. At least one VC firm is giving an algorithm a formal vote on its investments. And robots (which I consider to be computers with a physical presence) are increasingly working side by side with people on factory and warehouse floors.

In some cases it’s clear what each party brings to the collaboration. Because humans still have greater manual dexterity they’re the ones picking parts out of bins in the newest Amazon warehouses, while Kiva robots bring the shelves full of bins to the people quickly and reliably. The VC algorithm, if properly constructed, will systematically and objectively take into account “prospective companies’ financing… intellectual property and previous funding rounds” in a way that might be hard for biased, pressed-for-time humans to replicate. And chess computers keep human players from some kinds of dumb moves — the ones whose negative future consequences should have been foreseen, but weren’t.

But alchemy between people and computers — combinations that are way better than either party could do on its own — remains mysterious. In particular, it’s not clear to me (and many others) how people continue to add value as technology races ahead. Computers are clearly better at brute force computation and search, and their pattern matching abilities are improving by leaps and bounds these days. So what are we better at?

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