A year ago, IBM’s Watson supercomputer bludgeoned human supernerds Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy. Since then, Watson’s been putting its natural language interpretation skills to work for health care organisations, but now it’s coming for the money: As of yesterday, Watson works for Citigroup, one of the biggest financial corporations in the world.
IBM’s Watson is most famous for handing Ken Jennings his arse on Jeopardy, but since then the supercomputer’s talents have been used to help doctors diagnose and treat disease. But Watson’s greatest trick might still be ahead of it: beating back the scourge of patent trolls.
Watson’s defeat of man struck a hard blow against our hope of dominating computers in trivia party games ever again, but do you know who was hurt worse? The charity that Ken Jennings was playing for. Instead of taking home $US1 million, Ken Jennings won $US300,000 (and gave half of that to charity).
Woe be to the humble lawyer and overworked paralegal. Like master chess players and Jeopardy contestants before them, they too are now in the crosshairs of a superior artificial intelligence.
Until Watson can pull out answers as good as Teen Jeopardy contestants, I want no part of this new robotic trivia movement. [Gawker TV]
Got a few minutes? Head over to the Reddit blog and check out the Q&A session that the folks there conducted with the IBM Watson research team.
