The other day I heard a story that made me think that men can still be "smarter" than machines.
The story is a about a Russian soldier whose job was to monitor in a radar screen that the US was not launching a nuclear attack against Russia.
Suddenly the soldier saw in the radar screen that five US missiles were flying towards Moscow and in this scenario his orders were to counterattack by launching all the Russian missiles towards the US.
However, he did nothing and nothing happened because the five missiles that he had seen in the radar screen were not real missiles but some failure of the radar.
When the soldier was questioned why he had not followed the orders, he said that if the US wanted to launch a nuclear attack to destroy Russia, the US would have never launched five missiles but hundreds of them.
If instead of a human person controlling the radar, there would have been a computer using Artificial Intelligence..... what would have happened? Would the computer have been able to make the same deduction and come to the same conclusion that the soldier did?
Food for thought....
Fascinating story Andrés! It highlights the critical role of human intuition and strategic reasoning—qualities that are still difficult for AI to replicate. A machine trained purely on patterns and historical data might have followed protocol blindly, whereas the soldier applied contextual reasoning beyond the immediate data presented.
That said, the real challenge isn't just 'human vs. AI' but how we design decision-support systems that integrate both strengths: AI’s speed and pattern recognition with human judgment and situational awareness. The future isn’t about replacing human decision-making but augmenting it.