Check out this interesting discussion here: The Perfect and the Good. It’s a discussion by Malcolm Gladwell on using automated predictive models to calculate what kinds of revenues a movie might generate, just based on factors like the actors, the director, the genre, etc., all coded up as a mathematical equation. After he wrote about this topic, a bunch of people pointed out all the flaws involved. Pretty interesting.
Malcolm Gladwell’s response, which you can read in the link above, is that predictive models are often better on average than humans, but usually not better than the best human. Very true.
It reminded me of a pretty cool paper published at Legg Mason on the nature of expertise titled, Are you an Expert? I highly encourage you to read it.
Within the paper, they had this great diagram. Simply put, humans are better at computers at different things, depending on the problem domain:
