In 1997, Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer. It seemed like a watershed moment, recalling the rise of the machines long prophesied in science fiction.

Yet in 2005, a freestyle chess tournament featured teams of humans partnering with computers in various combinations. Shockingly, two amateurs using three fairly weak laptops emerged victorious, beating grand masters and supercomputers in turn.

This contrast is fittingly emblematic of two great visionaries of computer science, Marvin Minsky and J.C.R. Licklider. Minsky wrote canonical theories of self-replicating artificial intelligence and co-founded MIT's A.I. lab.

Licklider proposed an alternate vision in his landmark paper, "Man-Computer Symbiosis". In Licklider's view, human intelligence should be complemented by machines, not replaced: "Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions. ..."

Technology is too often viewed through a utopian or alarmist lens, and it's worth noting that Licklider's work spanned the sublime and sobering alike. He presaged much of the Internet revolution, and his research led to such breakthroughs as the modern graphical user interface. He also worked on a computer-aided missile defense system designed to collect and present data to a human operator, who would choose the appropriate response.

It's easy to argue that life and death decisions should never be left to machines, but Licklider's vision was much broader, recognizing technology as an enabler for many human capacities. Since Kasparov and Deep Blue squared off, we have seen numerous examples of man-computer symbiosis, while A.I. relying solely on computers as Minsky theorized it remains tantalizing, yet distant.

In terms of catalyzing human potential, the triumph of the chess amateurs in 2005 was just one glimpse of the future. Foldit, an online video game, allows nontechnical, nonbiologist players to visually "fold" protein structures, while computers calculate the chemical interactions corresponding to each arrangement.

In 2011, Foldit players needed only 10 days to produce an accurate 3-D model of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, a protease whose structure had stumped scientists for 15 years.

It was an astonishing triumph of human visual-spatial reasoning, and one of the first major scientific advances to come from playing a video game (though plenty of software engineers I know would argue that video games activate much more creativity than we care to acknowledge).

The tension between the Minsky and Licklider visions has certainly been amplified in the age of so-called big data. Now, consider that most of what we think of as "big data" is created by deliberate human action: phone calls, Web logs, credit card transactions, etc. When we hear about big data "solutions," they tend to focus on computational approaches -- storage, search and processing -- with human intuition largely absent. Yet the unraveling of big data into meaningful insight may depend just as heavily on the human side of the equation.