
Watson goes to college: How world’s smartest PC will revolutionize AI - iProject
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/02/watson-goes-to-college-how-the-worlds-smartest-pc-will-revolutionize-ai/
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dave_sullivan
There are going to be some revolutions in AI in coming years, but I don't
think they will come from IBM (or google or msft or any other similarly
established company)

In the history of major technological advances, when has a big established
player gotten it right? IBM _invented_ the relational database, but Oracle (a
tiny startup at the time) still ate their lunch for years. Why? Because IBM
had already invested too much in non-relational databases and would have been
cannibalizing their own business. Watch the exact same thing happen to Watson,
the software powering Google's self driving cars, whatever Kurzweil is working
on, etc. Not to mention, many of the current AI luminaries heading research at
these companies are near retirement age--not to be ageist, but Einstein did
not develop the theory of relativity near retirement, he did it when he was
26. Why would the biggest advances in AI be different?

The company that really gets AI right--the company that can call itself "the
AI company" like google can call itself "the search company" and facebook can
call itself "the social company"--you probably haven't heard of it yet.

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slacka
Watson is a great example of the graduation evolution of weak AI. It succeeds
beautifully in its narrowly defined goals, but is still just a glorified
statistical search engine. It will not revolutionize AI anymore than Deep Blue
did with Chess or the speech recognition software of the 90s did.

To quote Jeff Halwkings "As Searle showed with the Chinese Room, behavioral
equivalence is not enough. Since intelligence is an internal property of a
brain, we have to look inside the brain to understand what intelligence is. As
we'll soon see, there is an underlying elegance of great power, one that
surpasses our best computers, waiting to be extracted from these neural
circuits. ... For half a century we've been bringing the full force of our
species' considerable cleverness to trying to program intelligence into
computers. In the process we've come up with word processors, databases, video
games, the Internet, mobile phones, and convincing computer-animated
dinosaurs. But intelligent machines still aren't anywhere in the picture. To
succeed, we will need to crib heavily from nature's engine of intelligence,
the neocortex. We have to extract intelligence from within the brain. No other
road will get us there. "

I'd put my money on Deep Neural Networks or Hawkings' Hierarchical Temporal
Memory approach to "revolutionize AI".

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dbaupp
Searle didn't show anything of the sort. There have been many responses to it,
such as pointing out that it is the whole system, rather than the man, that
understands Chinese, or that it is begging the question in terms of the
uniqueness of human intelligence.

E.g. a fun response which reverses it to be AI talking about humans
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/ghj/searles_cobol_room/>

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s_baby
His thought experiments give a good illustration of the "hard problem" of
consciousness.

A) It's not rationally possible to explain qualia in terms of quantitative
phenomena. We can draw correlations using empiricism but they are ontologies
fundamentally inconsistent with one another.

B) Intelligence does not imply experience. One of the biggest problems here is
conflation of the two. An amoeba has intelligence with basic consciousness of
its surroundings. That does not mean it has experiences.

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neop
I don't know much about AI, but I highly doubt Watson will revolutionize
anything. Significant advances in AI will most likely come from better
software and algorithms and while IBM is great at doing hardware, they are not
so good when it comes to software. The way I see it, Watson is just IBM doing
PR work to get people to know their brand since they don't really offer any
consumer products anymore.

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jechen
I wouldn't discount IBM so quickly- to my understanding IBM's been partnering
with a lot of institutions to beef up Watson. I know Carnegie Mellon was quite
involved through the whole Jeopardy showcase (I even got to watch him school
contestants from local universities in Pittsburgh).

What's to say better software and algorithms won't be developed as a result of
IBM's push to find new use cases for Watson? The article goes into great
detail about how Watson has already contributed to the current AI landscape. I
for one love that IBM's relocating Watson to a university where students will
get to interface with the machine.

Haters gonna hate.

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treerex
"PC"? Watson's hardware weighs in at around 40 tons total.

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gojomo
Watson's strongest and most unique advantage may be IBM's PR department.

