Thursday, March 3, 2011

Jeopardy and Watson


I watched when the two top human champions of Jeopardy's history played against Watson, IBM's supercomputer. It was an impressive display, not only because the computer won, but because the two human competitors kept at it and managed to do fairly well in spite of playing against an advanced computer with mega-speed. I wasn't surprised at the few times when Watson failed to come up with the correct answer or when it repeated the same answer that had already been deemed incorrect. These incidents demonstrated without doubt that Watson wasn't 'thinking' like a human, but 'processing' information, like a computer, which is what we expect our computers to do.
I think the biggest challenge to humans in our not so distant future will be to remember when confronted with computers that seem more and more like they have human persona's, that they are not lifeforms and that they don't have emotions and creativity and potential for intuitive leaps. We may end up with androids among us, but they won't be like C3PO, displaying emotions like fear and worry and cowardice or bravery. If we forget that and begin to rely on an advanced computer to use emotion based criteria in a decision it could lead to some really bad results.

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