Yep couldn't agree more with you - human beings are very complicated - even one-to-one interaction can leave you flawed (e.g. just look at all the failed marriages!). I think it comes down to the simple fact that you can never experience how someone else experiences - so you'll never truly understand anothers behaviour... Unless you can climb inside their head and change their behaviour - Being John Malkovich.

I understand your point, but it's not necessarily humans against algorithms, but humans PLUS algorithms. Google realized that, and uses hundreds of freelancers worldwide to provide inputs to their complex pagerank algorithms. Pandora does the same, to classify songs and affinities. Del.icio.us does the same aggregating and categorizing the web. Algorithms can be super-ultra-smart, if you give them a hand (or a brain)... There's a brilliant article by Tim O'Reilly on last Make Magazine about the same subject. See it here: http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol08/?pg=15&pm=1&u1=texterity&liid=93a62ed593

ps: forgot to mention that, obviously, nothing will ever be a substitute for guts, for (human) insights. Nothing can even come close to amount of data the human brain can process in a fraction of second :o)

Data is good for helping to inform a decision. There isn't ever enough machine-generated data for you to come to a 100% conclusion based solely on that data when it comes to human behavior. I tend to believe that machines can't track 99% of all relevant data when it comes to trending behavioral patterns. (Do machines track my state of mind? What I had for breakfast? Whether or not I just lost one of my gloves?) Sometimes, data provides an insight on behavior that isn't necessarily expected. The indicator that there's an over-reliance on data is the view that the "insight" 1s overly valuable - to immediately lend it credence and reliability because it was unexpected...instead of inherently questioning it and/or trying to understand it. Of course, the opposite is also true. When data comes back and validates your idea/insight, are you quick to say "See? We're right!?" Or do you say "OK, how do we prove that both the data and our insight is correct?" The danger is (and always has been) over-reliance on data. Good data isn't a replacement for thinking.

In my wallet I carry a card that says; "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert Einstein Data is knowledge, true insight requires imagination and without it data remains simply numbers.