I just love the IBM Watson Technology and have been following it for quite some time. Back in 1983 we saw a movie which is now basically a cult film. The movie featured a AI computer Hal, which decided to take over the world …
IBM Watson
For those that does not know "who/what" IBM Watson is, it is the IBM technical platform which specialises in Artificial Intelligence and have been in development for years. In my opinion it is very successful technology, which will go a long distance. Especially due to the fact that they are targeting the business world to assist with AI. When you target the business world successfully and make some money while doing so, you have more investment money to put back into the research and development to ensure a useful product in the long run.
The Watson technology has been so effective that it actually won the First place prize of $1 Million dollars in the TC Quiz show Jeopardy
Watson is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy! and, in 2011, the Watson computer system competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings winning the first place prize of $1 million.
Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet during the game. For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.
Source Wikipedia
Watson will this year be used to analyse Wimbledon games to suggest the best matches and automatically generate highlight reels based on the crowd response.
IBM's Watson can apparently do everything. From manufacturing and medical treatment planning to portrait drawing and filing your taxes, there seems to be no limit to what the Jeopardy-winning AI can do. And next week, Watson will be offering its services to the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
The technology is just amazing. Please read the article IBM’s Watson will analyze Wimbledon to suggest the best matches
But what about Hal 9000.
I personally believe that we are very far from computers taking over the world, but I just love this technology. AI will help a lot of industries to become better and more effective. It all depends on the people behind the technology and how they apply it in the real world.
Many believe that computers or robots will take over the world some day. If we look at the speed that technology is moving at and the carelessness of human kind in applying technology, it just might be possible. I for one believe that it will take a very long time for something like this to happen. If you asked me 10 years ago if this is possible, I would've laughed it off.
Now I am not so sure ... WHA HA HA HA HA ... What is your opinion?
Happy Steeming!
