In forecasting, as in other fields, we will continue to see human judgment being displaced—to the consternation of white-collar workers—but we will also see more and more syntheses, like “freestyle chess,” in which humans with computers compete as teams, the human drawing on the computer’s indisputable strengths but also occasionally overriding the computer. The result is a combination that can (sometimes) beat both humans and machines. To reframe the man-versus-machine dichotomy, combinations of Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue may prove more robust than pure-human or pure-machine approaches.
