Computer knows best?

In his latest book, "Average is Over", Tyler Cowen, an economics professor from George Mason University in Virginia, states that, in future, only the top 15% of people will prosper, in a hyper-meritocratic society. The remaining 85% will remain forever impoverished, consigned to a life of low wages and low chances of progression.

His claims are based on the fact that this top tier of people will be those who accept that computers are better at making decisions and have greater depth of knowledge than the average person. He says: "Humans who believe they know best are wrong and will be punished in the workplace for their arrogance."

He does make an interesting point that much information exists online, but only those who are the most self-motivated to interrogate this information will be able to take advantage of it.

But is he right? He seems to eschew the power of intuition, of learned behaviour and of the cognitive power of the brain to adapt to the environment and make sense of it. Moreover, could you trust a computer to make ethical decisions for you? How valuable would a computer be at analysing the evidence in a murder trial, when it could not interpret the defendant's body language?

I still believe there are some limits on what we can expect computers to achieve on our behalf. But there is, similarly, a large proportion of tasks that we can consign to a device that can analyse and evaluate much faster than humans can. And that never forgets anything!