Recognition of the powerful pattern matching ability of humans is growing. As a result, humans are increasingly being deployed to make decisions that affect the well-being of other humans. We are starting to see the use of human decision makers in courts, in university admissions offices, in loan application departments, and in recruitment. Soon humans will be the primary gateway to many core services. The use of humans undoubtedly comes with benefits relative to the data-derived algorithms that we have used in the past.

One of the things that really annoys AI researchers is how supposedly "intelligent" machines are judged by much higher standards than are humans. Take self-driving cars, they say. So far they've driven millions of miles with very few accidents, a tiny number of them fatal. Yet whenever an autonomous vehicle kills someone there's a huge hoo-ha, while every year in the US nearly 40,000 people die in crashes involving conventional vehicles. Likewise, the AI evangelists complain, everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained.