Human + Machine
A Winning Partnership
As we forecast in 2010’s Technology Horizons research, the next ten years will see smart machines entering virtually every domain of our lives: assisting doctors during surgery, fighting on battlefields, building things in factories, and assisting in classrooms, nursing homes, and offices. As machines augment and replace humans in various tasks, their largest impact may be less obvious: their presence among us will change how we see ourselves, forcing us to confront the fundamental question of what we humans are uniquely good at. What is our competitive advantage, and where is our place alongside these machines?
It’s not so long ago that economists heatedly debated issues of global division of labor. It made sense that people, organizations, and countries would specialize in what they did best. Now we need to figure out a new division of labor, between humans and machines.
We’re on the cusp of a major transformation in our relationships with our tools, analogous to the transformation humanity went through during the agrarian revolution. As agricultural production became mechanized, many farming jobs disappeared and farming families moved to cities, where they became responsible for building bridges and skyscrapers, producing things in factories, and creating new kinds of services.
Despite generations of new technologies, we’re now working more rather than less. Adult male peasants in the 13th century in the United Kingdom worked an average of 1,600 hours a year; a manufacturing worker in the United Kingdom in 1990 worked 1,850 hours; an investment banker in New York today works close to 5,000 hours. There hasn’t yet been a technology that has resulted in our working less. This is because machines don’t just replace what we do, they change the nature of what we do: by extending our capabilities, they set new expectations for what’s possible and create new performance standards and needs. Before we created dishwashers, we didn’t expect our glasses to be spotlessly clean, nor did we think dustless floors were necessary until we introduced vacuum cleaners into every home. Our tools change us.
Over the next decade, while machines will replace humans in some tasks, they’ll also amplify us, enabling us to do things we never dreamed of doing before.. We’ll enter into a new kind of partnership with these machines—one that will shine light on the unique comparative advantages of humans: thinking, creativity, spontaneity, adaptability, and improvisation.
Whereas in the 1990s Gary Kasparov battled the mighty IBM supercomputer, today anyone can buy a $50 program that will crush most grandmasters. But here’s a twist: in 2005, Playchess.com hosted a “freestyle” chess tournament online, in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. Several groups of grandmasters working with multiple computers at the same time entered the competition. As Kasparov describes it in The New York Review of Books:
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
Amateurs armed with good strategies and harnessing the computational power of machines turned out to be the winning combination! That’s the best metaphor for the evolving new machine-human partnership: with smart machines as our partners, we can operate at the level of grandmasters, not just in chess but in most domains of our lives, from science and medicine to game playing and commerce. The combination of humans partnering with machines and using superior strategies opens up new worlds for exploration.
Publication Date
2010