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IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

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Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#2

Post by cryptoz »

Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him - to beat them in the match coming up. I can't wait to watch this live. What an epic moment in the process of moving slowly from weak AI -> strong AI.

Watson can do amazing NLP (and presumably Machine Learning), which is something that the general public perceives as straight up "AI". NLP has been lagging far behind expectations for decades, but with Google's new Translate apps and Watson competing on Jeopardy, it seems like NLP is pretty close to being fully solved.

Very exciting. Very, very exciting.

Edit:

> Eventually the machine will prevail.

This sends chills down my spine.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#3

Post by acangiano »

This is going to be, for lack of better words, epic. On a personal level however, it's a reminder of how truly wondrous the future is.

When Deep Blue beat Kasparov I was a kid in an Italian high school, trying to explain to disinterested fellow students why that was a big deal.

Not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined to be working for the company that made that and this event possible, in a different country than my own.

Sorry for the slightly off topic comment, but I just wanted to remind everyone that the future can be a beautiful and surprising time if you stick around long enough to witness it.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#4

Post by JoeAltmaier »

cryptoz wrote: post #2

Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him - to beat them in the match coming up. I can't wait to watch this live. What an epic moment in the process of moving slowly from weak AI -> strong AI. Watson can do amazing NLP (and presumably Machine Learning), which is something that the general public perc…

Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show.

Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would you have to talk about?)

We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#7

Post by shawnee_ »

The crazy thing is that Watson is On PBS last night - http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622

The "Making Stuff" series on Nova that's been airing the last week or so is very interesting: Making Suff Smarter / Stronger / Cleaner / Smaller. Watson was first mentioned during the episode of "Making Stuff Smarter" but I guess it merits its own segment.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#9

Post by cryptoz »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #4
cryptoz wrote: post #2

Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him - to beat them in the match coming up. I can't wait to watch this live. What an epic moment in the process of moving slowly from weak AI -> strong AI. Watson can do amazing NLP (and presumably Machine Learning), which is something that the general public perc…

Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would…

Watson is not a simulation any more than your brain is a simulation. Your brain is (likely) mostly just algorithms and data structures, albeit on an enormous scale. This could be wrong, but I'm betting not. What else could the brain possibly be? It's not magic.

> We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech.

Nah. Look at good science fiction to see why this is false. The most dangerous AI ever conceived might be something like Skynet or HAL 9000; machines that are cold, calculating and have no emotion whatsoever. But they do hold weapons, they do speak English and they are intelligent. I'm not suggesting we'll ever build anything like what we see in science fiction, but good writers often are able to predict - or even influence (see Clark, Asimov) - the future.

Algorithms to sort facts are indeed the beginnings of machine intelligence.

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