Humans evolved skills for pattern recognition, the ability to see the order within chaos. Sometimes the order is apparent, but the logic behind the discovery isn’t. Whether the act was one of an active subconscious, a memory recall, or some other mechanism, we can attribute it to intuition. The ability to make intuitive leaps seemed to be one of the hurdles that computers may never cross; and yet, they just did. At least in one study, computers beat human intuition.
“It’s fairly common for machines to analyze data, but humans are typically required to choose which data points are relevant for analysis. In three competitions with human teams, a machine made more accurate predictions than 615 of 906 human teams. And while humans worked on their predictive algorithms for months, the machine took two to 12 hours to produce each of its competition entries.” – Quartz
With advances in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and expert systems, computers are advancing into another field that was expected to be a safe haven for human employment: research. For now, the systems will enable and amplify human-initiated endeavours.
(Click on the photo for the link.)
“An Algorithm Can Predict Human Behavior Better Than Humans” – Quartz
Pretending Not To Panic 
The problem will be the assumptions on which analytical algorithms predicting human behaviour are founded. We have but to go back a century to see some of the follies of framing assumptions on society. And that without the speed of having a machine calculate them.
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