I had a college professor who frequently quipped that "a computer is a very fast moron.” I don’t think he originated the quote, but I do think it is very instructive.
When you hear computer CPUs described as "1.8 Ghz” what that really means is that the computer is (theoretically) capable of doing a math problem 1.8M times every second. A dual core processor can do 3.6M math problems in a second, and a quad core processor can do 7.2M math problems in a second. Suffice to say that computers do math a lot faster than people do.
When you think about it, a lot of things in life can be modeled as a math problem. The morning drive to the office, a game of chess, the trajectory of a missile, preparing dinner, and even large parts of human language can be modeled reasonably accurately as math problems. Given enough time and money spent on defining the rules of a problem, many things can very consistently be done better by a computer than a human.
Another advantage that computers have is that they are amazing at learning in parallel. If a human wants to learn something, he/she has the fundamental limitation of only having 24 hours in a day minus eating and sleeping. A machine on the other hand can divide and conquer. If a team decides one day that they want to do something crazy like organize the world’s information and make the best of human knowledge available to anyone instantaneously, they can spin up a few million computers and digest all of the worlds information a few times a day to account for the continually growing/changing nature of the global conversation.
In short, computers are very good at an ever-increasing number of tasks that can be broken down either into data sets of things/events that have come before or a set of pre-defined rules. That said, computers haven’t learned how to define the rules of the game yet.
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