On the flipside, however, he points out again and again through the book how computers – and the vast wealth of rote information they can supply us with – have a tendency to actually overwhelm our pattern matching skills, causing us to see patterns where none really exist. Apophenia, basically; or Pareidolia – I’ve always been a bit unclear as to the distinction. Faces on Mars / Jesus on toast / Lenin in my shower curtain type of thing. In realms where there is a lot of volume of data – like predicting weather, for instance – you have to design your technological augmentation to spend a little of its much-vaunted computing power to pare down the raw data dump. Maybe give you a little statistical measure of the significance of the data, or run multiple simulations with varying assumptions and feed you outcome probabilities. The human pattern matching machine is still unmatched, but it can be swamped.

Anyways, not entirely certain how relevant it is to what you’re discussing, but it seemed related and its quite an interesting book, so I thought I’d point it out.