IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

Post by colivier » Thu, May 03, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

laichzeit0 wrote: post #121

The most ingenious trick that the IBM marketing department pulled was to get non-technical (and probably even technical people, judging by this thread) to think that Watson is some kind of singular thing. Like that it’s a single big neural network with different APIs on it, or something. I honestly think that’s what most people think Watson refers to. Watson is like Google Cloud Platform. It’s just a name for a platf…

I attended the IBM Connections conference in Vegas shortly after the Jeopardy! thing and just after IBM started using Watson as a brand under which it lumped a bunch of analytics products. From questions and comments made, during some of the sessions I attended, it became clear that large portion of the attendees (mostly the business people) wrongly assumed that the technology that won Jeopardy! was now being used inside everything labeled with "Watson". People were very excited by this. I never heard anyone from IBM making any attempt to try and rectify this misconception, they just smiled, nodded and played along. I disliked IBM and their corporate marketing BS even more after this.

Post by mrj » Fri, May 04, 2018, 3:55 PM UTC

Diederich wrote: post #224

mrj wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that their are trade-offs made, of course. But this society spends a ton of time trying to prevent all kinds of death. That's because life is sacred. It seems odd to argue that. Yeah of course we can't stop doing things, but it doesn't mean we don't try really hard to avoid killing people.

> try really hard to avoid killing people Yes, and both Elon Musk as an individual and Tesla Motors as an organization agree. How they approach that idea is somewhat different from what we're used to though. Their basic assertions are (in my words): 1. Vision and radar based technology, along with current generation GPUs and related hardware, along with sufficiently developed software, will be able to make cars 10x s…

That's a pretty cynical calculation to make. And no, we don't typically accept untested additional risk in the name of saving untold later. We test first. There's a reason why drugs are tested on animals first, then trials, then broad availability, but still with scrutiny and standards. This is a well trod philosophical argument, but we seem to have accepted that we don't kill a few to save others. We don't fly with untested jet engines. We don't even sell cars without crashing a few to test them. The other companies involved in self driving technology have been in testing mode. They have not skipped a step and headed straight for broad availability.

Why then does Tesla have a pass? There's no evidence it's actually safer. And there's no evidence that the company is truthful. We don't accept when a pharmaceutical company says, "no, it's good. Trust us." That would be crazy. We should not accept Tesla's assurances with blind faith simply because they have better marketing and a questionable ethical standard.

http://driving.ca/tesla/model-s/auto-news/news/iihs-study-sh...

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)

Re: IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)