IBM's Watson makes it official -- humanity is toast

[Renew Deal]

"I for one welcome our new computer overlords" -- that's a quote from Ken Jennings, the guy who used to be the world's biggest "Jeopardy" egghead until IBM's Watson supercomputer waxed the floor with him and Brad Rutter, his fellow puny human.

He was joking, but not by much. In a piece commissioned by Slate, the winner of 74 consecutive Jeopardy matches (until he met his match in Watson) writes:

Watson seems to represent a giant leap forward in the field of natural-language processing -- the ability to understand and respond to everyday English, the way Ask Jeeves did (with uneven results) in the dot-com boom. "Jeopardy" clues cover an open domain of human knowledge -- every subject imaginable -- and are full of booby traps for computers: puns, slang, wordplay, oblique allusions. But in just a few years, Watson has learned -- yes, it learns -- to deal with some of the myriad complexities of English. When it sees the word "Blondie," it's very good at figuring out whether "Jeopardy" means the cookie, the comic strip, or the new-wave band.

Yeah, sure, it helps that success in "Jeopardy" depends a great deal on how fast you can press a buzzer with your thumb -- and there is no faster thumb than a "electromagnetic solenoid trigged by a microsecond-precise jolt of current." And yes, we can take some small solace in the fact that Watson occasionally got things very wrong -- confusing the cities of Chicago and Toronto, for example, and "The Elements of Style" with author Dorothy Parker. (The New Atlantis has a detailed analysis of what Watson missed and why -- presumably written by a human.)

But mostly, we're toast, and it doesn't even necessarily take a supercomputer with 2,880 CPUs and a 15-terabyte database to spread the butter. As uber math geek Stephen Wolfram points out, your average search engine will do.
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http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/ibms-watson-makes-it-official-humanity-toast-136

[Xipe Totec]

1. So, the toasters have won?

[ixion]

2. we lowly carbon-based life forms are nothing compared to silicon...

I, for one, welcome our new overlords. :toast:

[City of Mills]

3. They still need us for electricity

Hope they don't know about bio-energy yet!

[divine_truine]

7. yup! all we need do is switch power to off & mister watson is toast!

city of mills...you are spot on! on the other hand, watson is mere surface reflection of true human potential!

[Shandris]

4. Let's hope they manage to get the kinks out of the Three Laws...

...or we're going to end up in a verrrrry bad state. :silly:

[yawnmaster]

5. Toronto will be a US city under computer overlord rule. eom

[Posteritatis]

6. I thought it already was?

(Sorry, obligatory rest-of-Canada response. ;) )