[mizzao]

I don't think there has to be a huge controversy here. It's perfectly plausible to build a system that contains a hybrid of human and machine intelligence, where the humans work on the more fuzzy questions that cannot be directly answered yet, and the interactions used to fill in the gap as the AI is improved for later.

[nhf]

Yep! There's a lot of research going on in that area. For example, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702416

Some recent work on fusing machine learning with Mechanical Turk workers to create "sensors".