Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Saturday October 29 2016, @01:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-here-it-won't dept.

In the next five years, every important decision, whether it's business or personal, will be made with the assistance of IBM Watson. That's the vision of IBM president and CEO Ginni Rometty, in a keynote speech at IBM's World of Watson conference Wednesday.

Watson, the company's artificial intelligence-fueled system, is working in fields like health care, finance, entertainment and retail, connecting businesses more easily with their customers, making sense of big data and helping doctors find treatments for cancer patients.

The Watson system is set to transform how businesses function and how people live their lives. "Our goal is augmenting intelligence," Rometty said. "It is man and machine. This is all about extending your expertise. A teacher. A doctor. A lawyer. It doesn't matter what you do. We will extend it."

Is one woman's vision another man's nightmare?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by TheLink on Saturday October 29 2016, @07:25PM

    by TheLink (332) on Saturday October 29 2016, @07:25PM (#420221) Journal

    The mistakes ( http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0215/On-Jeopardy-Watson-s-mistakes-reveal-its-genius [csmonitor.com] ) Watson makes show how little it really understands. So it would be a bad move to get rid of the people at this point.

    Watson is like a well trained idiot picking out answers from a pool of answers based on some heuristics and memorizing to not pick the wrong answers.

    It's good enough for some things but I doubt it's good enough to be allowed to work on anything really important without supervision.

    In contrast I daresay even rats have more understanding of the world than Watson does: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/rats-forsake-chocolate-save-drowning-companion [sciencemag.org]

    And definitely crows and ravens despite them having brains only the size of walnuts.

    I personally prefer if we took the path of augmenting humans. The technologies involved would be similar but the end results could be different. The AI approach may lead to more humans ending up as slaves or pets while the augmenting approach may be a better future for more of us.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2