Everything Intuition

Perusing The Economist, as is my wont, my eye was drawn to an article titled ‘Automated decision-making; the death of expertise.’

As ever, I felt impelled to  find out more for you.

The gist of it is that  the author of a new book (a Mr Ayres of Yale university, since you ask, and the book is called ‘SuperCrunchers’) stated that because of the wealth of information now available, computers do much better than experts in a variety of areas.

More unsettling is the statement that computers are better than doctors at diagnosing illness. (The implication is that such people should pack up their stethoscopes and take up fishing.) Maybe so, but are people more content with computers diagnosing than with doctors. Heaven knows, the health service is a shambles, but you do get to meet people and shout at them. Where is the stress relief in a computer interview?

So where does that leave creativity? Or decision-making?  Out in the cold, if Mr Ayres has his way.

Although it is a short article, it does show up, yet again, the fact that people are happy to let computers do more and more things at the expense of exploring what it is to be fully human.  Happiness, interaction, creating, daydreaming, intuiting (Yep! That’s right up there, in my book!), self-awareness an the other intangibles of life are what make us who we are. Relying on machines might be good for some things, but the scary thing is that no-one seems to know where to put an end to it.

Or, to put it another way, whether or not their lives are interesting enough to be worth reflecting upon.

Intuition, for me, is the rat that gnaws through the maze. It’s the annoying squeak you can’t find. It’s the sudden glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye. It is the irrational happily at work wrecking plans, sticking wrenches into carefully constructed ideas and the one intangible happy accident that makes being human glorious fun.

I’m not giving that up for a computer diagnosis!

Popularity: 54% [?]

Related posts

• Will vs Intuition... (0)
• Where intuition really is (0)
• What it isn't (0)
• Two lists, just for the heck of it... (0)
• There's more to intuition than meets the mind! (2)

Filed under: business, health, ideas, science