What worries me is not the unrealistic notion that a single algorithm will ever replace human emotional judgment (it will not): It's the amount of frustration t

What worries me is not the unrealistic notion that a single algorithm will ever replace human emotional judgment (it will not): It's the amount of frustration that blind faith in such algorithms will cause before we settle on supplementing them with common sense again. > (...) the accuracy of the personality judgment depends on the availability and the amount of the relevant behavioral information, along with the judges’ ability to detect and use it correctly (1, 2, 5). Such conceptualization reveals a couple of major advantages that computers have over humans. First, computers have the capacity to store a tremendous amount of information, which is difficult for humans to retain and access. Second, the way computers use information—through statistical modeling—generates consistent algorithms that optimize the judgmental accuracy, whereas humans are affected by various motivational biases (27). Nevertheless, human perceptions have the advantage of being flexible and able to capture many subconscious cues unavailable to machines. Because the Big Five personality traits only represent some aspects of human personality, human judgments might still be better at describing other traits that require subtle cognition or that are less evident in digital behavior. This last sentence is important: Looking at scores from quantitative psychological models, it is easy to forget that although a model has some predictive ability, the thought of a _complete_ model is an illusion. For example, low and high IQ scores have some merit in predicting people's success in life, but anyone who knows several people claiming to have high IQs will observe that such people's ability to actually accomplish something with their claimed ability varies greatly. I don't doubt that psychological models can be an efficient way of filtering through many potential candidates for a position, deciding what ad to show someone or predicting the chances of someone becoming a drug addict. They could even help us see past some of our cognitive biases when making a decision. But I don't think that we will ever, at least in the next hundred years, reach a point where most people let an algorithm trump their own judgment in decisions where the emotional stakes are high. For example, in choosing a life partner, dating services will probably use such algorithms to filter the candidates, but the user will probably make the final call on who to settle with. After all, personality tests have been around for decades, but most employers use a good old fashioned face-to-face interview to choose the person to fill the position.