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What to know about what you don't know you know.
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat the world's best chess player, Garry Kasparov. Immediately, some people noted that we were still superior at the ancient Chinese game of Go. Go, they reasoned, would remain out of robots' reach for the foreseeable future. Its plurality of possible moves and the nuances in evaluating even who's winning put it further out of the realm of rote combinatorics and into the orbit of intuition, supposedly humanity's specialty. "It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go," a Princeton astrophysicist told The New York Times soon after the Kasparov match. "Maybe even longer."
If you follow the news, you know it took until 2016.
What does the success of DeepMind's AlphaGo against the best meat-based players say about intuition, human or otherwise? On one hand, it knocks down some highfalutin' claims about this special sense, revealing it to be, as some psychologists have long held, nothing more than pattern recognition.
On the other, "pattern recognition" does not do full justice to the many patterns intuition recognizes. Most of human behavior happens automatically, guided by genetics and habit rather than conscious deliberation. "You could not get by if you walked into a restaurant and you had to reconstruct from first principles how to behave," says Valerie Thompson, a psychologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.
Even for more complex problems, intuition drives decisions, says Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In working with top executives at the largest German firms, he finds that "they go through all the data they have-and they're buried under data-and at the end the data don't tell them what they should do." Intuition, he says, "is a form of unconscious intelligence that is as needed as conscious intelligence."
Despite intuition's ubiquity, we harbor many mistaken intuitions about intuition. Here we'll consider eight facets of unconscious processing-including its application to creativity, morality, and social interaction-looking at what it does well, where it fails, who uses it, when we trust it, and how to improve it. Building Deep Blue and AlphaGo required a lot of hard, deliberate thought, but it also required...