Better tools can narrow the gap. In the next decades, the most important new sense-making tools will be those that help people visualize and simulate. Visualization techniques reduce vast and obscure pools of data into easily comprehended images. And simulations systems will become intellectual training wheels for executives, allowing them to experiment with strategies in the forgiving world of cyberspace, in much the same way that pilots in the Gulf war ran practice missions before flying the real thing. The gap can be narrowed, but the machine wise also know that it can never be closed, for the very tools we use for sense making generate even more information of their own.
Information breeds yet more information, and information tools are formidable breeders.
If we are not careful, we will chase our new tools, Alice-like, down a digital rabbit hole of infinite information regress, and here is how it may happen. The temptation, as simulation and other sense-making tools become more sophisticated, will be to substitute them for human judgment. That would be a mistake. Today machine-wise executives will not only know when and how to use the new tools technology brings them but also when to switch off their computers and take their own counsel.