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In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. Normally, “anti-cheating” algorithms are employed by online sites to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with computer assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ diagnostic analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less “intelligent” than the playing programs they detect.)
Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.[1]
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The combination of a human plus a computer is totally unbeatable, and will remain as such at least into the foreseeable future. Technological maximalists might argue that the human mind is close to being replicated, but we know so little about the brain even from a biological perspective that attempts to clone it have been completely feeble and introductory so far.
The combination of humans together with robots will always prevail over even the smartest robot or human alone, even if the humans working with the robot are not extraordinarily intelligent.
As for those who say that there will be an increase in wealth inequality, you only need to look at the technological progress of the last 200 years to know that the reverse is most likely true. While Henry Ford became incredibly wealthy by building the car and mechanising his production to a large extent, the rest of humanity saw huge increases in productivity by being able to drive around and use advanced logistics. Those advances ultimately enabled the next generation of workers to be a white collar workforce rather than a blue collar one.
Ultimately we all live inside a networked group of people operating under a social contract, and we will always create systems that balance out the extremes in an attempt to create a level playing field and enable the innovation, because entrenched hierarchies only beget technological stagnation - look at Europe (and increasingly, the United States). Technology requires a balanced society in order to exist - once the social fabric disappears then the prerequisites for innovation disappear with it, so the system generally manages to work itself out.
There are good reasons to be optimistic.
[1] http://www.palantir.com/2010/03/friction-in-human-computer-s...
See also: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html