Taking this further, most technology we use daily (word processors, email, the Internet, etc.) are enhancements of the man+machine organism and enhance our performance as well as the 'machine''s.
This worked between about 2008 and 2013; but those days are long one. Engines such as Stockfish 8 surpass both humans and human+engine "centaurs". That is, incorporating a human into the loop only makes things worse.
However Go was beaten by a neural network trained on millions of games. It already has pattern recognition. At least on par with humans, and probably superior to them. In the famous AlphaGo match, it considered and made moves that looked stupid to humans... at first.
I really doubt human + machine will do any better than just machine at Go. Or anything NNs take over. Human brains can't possibly compete with a machine that can iterate over billions of training examples in a few hours.
Shouldn't this be the ultimate goal anyway? I know Elon Musk sees the future where there is a merging of man and machine to enhance what he sees as man's limited upload bandwidth (talking, writing, gesticulating, etc.)
No offense but I literally laughed out loud when I got to that part. Reminds me of what people said about the internet. Doesn't that comparison lend credence to the notion that greater access to information might often lead to a retreat into comforting echo chambers? That greater ease of communication might often increase the vectors for infection for unreason?
Yes, folks have their echo chambers. But alternatively, perhaps we simply teach the new generation better critical thinking skills, introduce uncomfortable viewpoints, and how to better not fall for tricks such as "fake news".
Just because we have problems with echo chambers now doesn't mean that we will in the future. Heck, in a way, the internet is teaching us about our echo chambers - it isn't a new phenomenom (families and community provided it for us), but having a choice in one's echo chamber really is.
Humans have the ability to steer things to their advantage so interesting things can happen.
Just for kicks here's a more hopeful approach that I've heard...merge AI with the brain like Kurzweil was predicting. Imagine if everyone was a genius and telekinetic so then we get the neural internet from that. We would actually be less divided, more connected and more productive as a human race. Our current sense of self is too selfish and our intellect too limited. I'm sure it would be very difficult to hold on to beliefs devoid of reason in that case so everyone could make better decisions, not just about themselves but about humanity, etc. because they could perceive things at a grander scale.