Can Computers Make Better Decisions Than Humans

Poll

Can computers make better decisions by mining historical data than humans who rely on their intuition ? [148 votes total] Yes, data mining is more accurate than intuition (36) 24% Usually, unless the conditions change significantly compared to historical data (86) 58% No, human intuition is better than a computer (26) 18%

Comments

Venkat, Can computers make better decisions by mining?
Hmm....I am sure with bad data/attributes irrelevant of whether its a human or a computer, both can go wrong. But given good attributes/data a computer has a better chance in computing more quantities of data in lesser time than humans.
And to define something as good data/important attributes a computer needs a human.

Charlie Kufs, IMHO
I think computer algorithms are best when the important variables are defined. Airplane autopilots work great unless something unexpected happens, then you need a pilot. But humans make bad decisions often because they ignore relevant data or pay too much attention to irrelevant data that should be ignored. How many bad business decisions have been made because of office politics or a CEO's ego?

Karl Brazier, Usual? Better?
I was tempted to vote for 'usually', but then decided the question gives rise to others to which I don't have the answer, and which seem rather substantive to me. In particular, when we say usually, has anyone investigated how many decisions people make? I imagine people are making a vast number of unrecorded decisions all the time and we only have a tiny and biased sample of decisions to consider from areas where formality and recording of decision making are reasonably commonplace (e.g. in institutional management).

Then, there is the issue of what is a 'better' decision. Judged using what metric? Some kind of quality-of-life impact metric would seem like the obvious thing to consider, but designing these is itself a far-from-solved (and never entirely likely to be) problem.

So I have decided my answer is simply 'don't know' and have abstained from the vote. Can't help thinking, though, maybe this is an area for that 'Grand Challenge'...?

Editor, Do computers make better decisions than humans?
Recently, New York Times wrote about a professor from Netherlands who is convinced that computer models generally make better decisions than humans. He even issued a challenge late last year to any company willing to pit its humans against his algorithms.
See KDnuggets News 06:n14, item 16. What do you think?