Watson might take over the world

I think Watson might be the first steps in A.I. This technology will first be used in the health care sector. Doctors will use Watson to scan everything from MRI's to X-Rays and Watson will tell the Doctor what the diagnosis is most likely to be.

Just imagine how this will work in everyday life. You can ask Watson which job you should take based on which one you are most likely to succeed at based on your education and past experiences.

You can ask Watson to give you a 30 day diet based on your eating habits that will help you lose 40 pounds.

We can ask how did life most likely begin, panspermia, directed panspermia or abiogenesis?

We can ask which planet in our solar system most likely has life on it and what type of life are we most likely to find?

Eventually Watson's technology will govern every aspect of our lives and answer all of our questions.

I remember reading a prediction along these lines. It wasn't a prediction based on prophecy but the singularity and technology.

It basically said that A.I. would come in the form of a computer that would be like an Oracle to us. We will become dependent on this computer because it will reduce the uncertainty in life. This computer would become like a god to us.

This might be happening in front of our eyes and it all began on Jeopardy.

reply to post by Matrix Rising


Watson is no Skynet. In fact, he crashes quite often apparently.
Gizmodo Link

I do agree that Watson is a step towards true A.I. though. Who knows, maybe we'll have an A.I. similar to Cortana in a couple of decades.

Watson is a search engine linked to an offline version of Wikipedia.

Everyday science advances towards more and more sophisticated computer brains but Watson, Watson was little more than a gimmick, likely to boost Jeopardy ratings.

We already have specialized AIs that excel at doing 1 task, so what you may be thinking of is actual Artificial Sentience. It did think Toronto was an American city after all; a sophisticated search algorithm would have eliminated any non-American city from it search during that question.



Unless it secretly knows Canada is just America's Attic.

People have to realize that this is just some of the early steps and the technology will get better over time. I bet the team behind Watson already have 100 things in their heads that will make the technology better.

They are already planning to get Watson to the health care field.

IBM has said its Watson computer would be applied beyond Jeopardy and now is making good on that promise. IBM and Nuance Communications have launched a research program to commercialize Watson for the healthcare industry.

If you recall, Nuance has a big footprint in the healthcare market where voice recognition is common. The plan for IBM and Nuance is to combine Big Blue’s Deep Question Answering (QA), natural language processing and machine learning with Nuance’s speech recognition and clinical language understanding software.

IBM and Nuance expect the first commercial tools from the Watson collaboration to be available in about 18 to 24 months.

www.zdnet.com...

This is the way things are going, there will probably be a few different AI versions growing up, competing and merging. The capabilities of computers and maths behind neural networks is pretty amazing and will outperform any human brain when it can utilise the resources of the Internet. As a source of advice it will be priceless, giving it the keys to the robot army before it is ready might not be such a good idea.

The dark side of this is that this technology can be manipulated. Let's say Watson technology is right on just about everything and we become dependent on it as a species. It then says:

If you don't kill 3 billion people in 5 years the planet will be destroyed because of global warming. He says this with a confidence level of 97%. It can get very ugly.

reply to post by Matrix Rising


Well we have 5 years to build a big enough spaceship to fit 3 billion people and send them somewhere else or start focusing on other options. It is better than having 2 years to sort out such a problem if it was just left to people alone, and this is enough enough people listen to it. Risks and threats are everywhere no matter which way we go. It will be a while before AI is up there with god for omnipresent awareness if possible. It will make mistakes and some things will be outside its frame of reference, just like all of us. The heads up and capability to collaborate so much data will help in knowing where to start looking.

I think it could be turned into a quite good possibly turing test passing chatbot (I'm thinking scan every book in existence for similar speech and replys) or another internet search engine but I don't see much else let's face it it's a room in size and doesn't really do anything new but understand jeopardy questions.

Impressive it won but as far as I can see it's similar to a few fake AI attempting chatbots in how it works.

reply to post by defcon5

It is certainly not going to answer all of our questions as it gets its answers from us to begin with.

It is at least going to need some data or sensory input from us. With things data mining, image recognition and other things things that contain a vast amount of info, the human operator will just go WTF . With different pattern recognition techniques it can find answers we did not know where there. There are already some algorithms that can help with this, but still an evolving area.

reply to post by Matrix Rising


Relatively speaking (and paraphrasing from a quote I read somewhere):

Coming up with the right answers is the easy part.

Coming up with the right questions is the hard part.

Luckily for us, that is an area that is quintessentially "human"...

HAL does equal IBM, HAL is merely the letters before IBM HI AB LM. Cute.

I watched Jeopardy last night. I think Watson was a gimmick. The other contestants would leave with a min. of 50 grand just for showing up, and they got to be on the show again and donate to their charities. Of course Watson won, all of his winnings went to charity, that was the master plan. Doesnt take a supercomputer to figure Hollywood out.

Saying it's a gimmick is in my opinion true I think the show was an IBM publicity stunt. I also think they slowed it down quite a bit to let contestants answer occasionally. While it wasn't always right I think it's safe to say the reflexes of a computer are a lot faster than human ones and it would have been easy to have it shut out humans completely.

I do think it's impressive how it made sense of the questions there was definitely a lot of data being moved and work being done with every question. I really liked it showed the top 3 possibility it came up with and it's confidence in them.

With all the racks upon racks of data it had it makes me wonder what exactly was on it I have the entire wikipedia database on my mp3 player as an example and that only takes up about 6gb. I'm thinking Watson had considerably more and was able to check everything each question.

Maybe it is a big breakthrough but I wouldn't worry about it taking over anything AI seems to be a very long way off.

People who say it's a gimmick don't make any sense.

To make that statement you have to throw out information about computers, A.I., algorithms and natural language. Watson has to answer a question by weighing the context of the question. This is HUGE.

For instance if the category is Superheroes and the clue is He's the masked web crawler.

Watson will weigh the answers and let's say he has a 95% confidence it's Spider Man then he will buzz in.

Watson can look at a clue like masked web crawler and put the clue together to weigh the most probable answer based on the context of the words. I typed this into Google and I got back websites about Daredevil, Spider Man, web content and more.

Again this is huge because Watson isn't just fishing for information, he's weighing the most probable answer and he also has confidence or a lack of confidence in his answer.

So what we upload information into it. We do the same thing with children. We have to tell a child what an apple is or what a stove is and don't touch it because it's hot. Information has to come from somewhere so complaining about information being uploaded doesn't make any sense.

The question is can the computer learn from this information and can it give us new information based on this information. Watson is a big step in this direction.

For instance, Watson technology might be able to diagnose a disease based on tests that may elude a human Doctor. So you may get early detection for some diseases.

Whilst Watson's A.I. capabilities are a milestone in computer engineering, the real turning point will be reached when it's able to match humans in A.S...Artificial Stupidity

reply to post by Matrix Rising


I'm just waiting for this thing to get out of control and become self aware. It's a good thing that Kirk already figured out how to defeat such a monstrosity. Everything Mudd says is a lie. If everything he says is a lie, he cannot be telling me the truth so everything Mudd says is the truth but if everything Mudd says is a lie than...Head pops off.

I believe that there is something far more advanced than what we were witnessing on Jeopardy.

Originally posted by Teknikal
I also think they slowed it down quite a bit to let contestants answer occasionally.

With all the racks upon racks of data it had it makes me wonder what exactly was on it I have the entire wikipedia database on my mp3 player as an example and that only takes up about 6gb.

Those racks were for processors, not disk storage. They had to use a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers (3.5 GHz Power7 eight core processors) to SPEED UP Watson to a level that it was able to perform the searches in the order of 3 seconds required to make it competitive against a human. If they ran the types of parallel searches that were required on a normal computer it would have take over 3 hours to finish each search.

Originally posted by defcon5

Originally posted by Teknikal
I also think they slowed it down quite a bit to let contestants answer occasionally.

With all the racks upon racks of data it had it makes me wonder what exactly was on it I have the entire wikipedia database on my mp3 player as an example and that only takes up about 6gb.

Those racks were for processors, not disk storage. They had to use a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers (3.5 GHz Power7 eight core processors) to SPEED UP Watson to a level that it was able to perform the searches in the order of 3 seconds required to make it competitive against a human. If they ran the types of parallel searches that were required on a normal computer it would have take over 3 hours to finish each search.

Yes I know that already but some of the racks were undoubtedly for storage as well a search shows it has 4 Terabytes of data storage and no matter what way you look at it that is an incredible amount of data.
With Wikipedia fitting in at about 6gb it really makes me wonder what they could possible filled it up with.

Maybe they just put a copy of the entire internet on it but I still think it's pretty amazing it can search and cross reference all the different possibility's contained in it and work out a likely answer.

It's a cool machine but in my opinion totally unrelated to AI but I still think it could be turned into the worlds best chatbot and fake the AI.

Originally posted by Teknikal

Yes I know that already but some of the racks were undoubtedly for storage as well a search shows it has 4 Terabytes of data storage and no matter what way you look at it that is an incredible amount of data.
With Wikipedia fitting in at about 6gb it really makes me wonder what they could possible filled it up with.

Most likely a lot of it was taken up by search indices used rapidly search through documents.
A copy of the net would be worthless as there is as much incorrect info out there as good info.