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Adding video to channels (Brain) - requested by jonny.

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Go IBM Watson!

Christ this whole Watson thing is so overblown, lame and irritating. It is my Sanjaya.

GG, IBM Watson!

@budzos Why do you say that? Is it not amazing to have a self contained machine being able to listen to, understand, and correctly answer natural language questions better than humans?

Is it not difficult to see that this is a pretty amazing step along the way to creating machines that can converse with us with spoken word like robots in Science Fiction Films?

How is that not exciting?

>> ^spoco2:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/budzos" title="member since October 30th, 2006" class="profilelink">budzos Why do you say that? Is it not amazing to have a self contained machine being able to listen to, understand, and correctly answer natural language questions better than humans?
Is it not difficult to see that this is a pretty amazing step along the way to creating machines that can converse with us with spoken word like robots in Science Fiction Films?
How is that not exciting?


I agree with the sentiment of the answer! AI has been my sci-fi hope for as long as I can remember. Probably why I thought "The moon is the harsh mistress" is the best book ever. When I was back in college, one of the papers I wrote was on the current state of AI, and the likelihood of the AI we see in TV and movies coming to fruition. It is amazing, and frustratingly slow field of discovery. It has taken 30 years just to begin to start to code machines to interpret language. In pursuit of this, we have come to a better understanding of how complex human speech is, and how powerful the brain is in understanding this very complex arena.

With that said, Watson doesn't "understand" or answer questions better than humans. There are many clips of the respondents just failing to beat Watson to the buzzer, most likely possessing the correct answer. Watson is the same level of impressive as the normal champs, but with mechanical reflexes. Give the humans robotic arms, and I am sure it would be a level playing field. Or, give Watson the questions one word like the humans have to do. He gets his input all in one text file and starts parsing for information before the humans have had the entirety of the question read to them (though, Watson's speed might be as such that this is trivial).

Also, as of yet, computers don't have "understanding". They can answer questions in a way that seems to make them intelligible, but they don't understand. Understanding comes from consciousness. It is still only understands the wold in terms of syntax. It is able to apply this language of syntax to properly answer trivia, but has no understanding of what the question even means. It doesn't have any experiences which are necessary for understanding. It is like if you train a parrot to respond with the correct answers to trivia questions, it doesn't actually know what it is saying.

Watson is the better parts of a parrot, and a repository of human facts. Philosophically, I am convinced that true "AI" is impossible...but I hope I am wrong! None the less, this is still super exciting, and unprecedented...how can you compare it to Sanjaya!