From Garry Kasparov at TED:
Advanced Chess found its home on the internet, and in 2005, a so-called freestyle chess tournament produced a revelation. A team of grandmasters and top machines participated, but the winners were not grandmasters, not a supercomputer. The winners were a pair of amateur American chess players operating three ordinary PCs at the same time. Their skill of coaching their machines effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of their grandmaster opponents and much greater computational power of others. And I reached this formulation. A weak human player plus a machine plus a better process is superior to a very powerful machine alone, but more remarkably, is superior to a strong human player plus machine and an inferior process. This convinced me that we would need better interfaces to help us coach our machines towards more useful intelligence.
More.
It occurs to a layperson that we do not really need machines that can think like people. We are not short of people. We need machines that can do mental tasks that people can certainly do, on which we would rather not spend our time.
See also: From LiveScience: “IBM scientists spent years constructing Deep Blue, and all it could do was play chess”