lI cannot recommend Sherry Turkle’s new book “Alone Together” highly enough. It is an outstanding exposition on where all this is leading and why. “Alone Together” is compulsory reading foreveryone interested in the future.

Thanks David! We’ll add this book to our library.

Yesterday I spoke to Hans Peter Willems and he had some interesting thoughts. In the first part of our conversations I said that he should actually connect to you. Later on, he said: ‘a guy who wrote a book on love and sex with robtots’. And I said: ‘that’s David Levy, that’s the man we were talking about’.

And today, totally ‘incidentally’, you’re here on the forum. I’ll forward the thread to Hans Peter.

What do you think about Watson? 14 years after Deep Blue?

An incredible coincidence indeed

David, thanks for the pointer to the book. I’ll order it soon enough (still awaiting delivery of ‘On Intelligence’), must get your book as well btw (I know about it because I read several reviews on it).

As for the ‘interesting thoughts’ that Erwin mentions; if you are interested to connect with me directly just let me know, I have several things that I would like to discuss with you. Want to know some more about me first, just ask Erwin

Somehow, my post got lost. Anyway, what I wanted to say: thanks, I’ll put it on the list of ‘stuff to read on holiday (when I ever find the time for one)’ 

What do I think of Watson?

It is clearly an excellent question-answering system, with potential to become even better. Remember, when Kasparov first played Deep Blue in 1996 he won. Just one year later he lost. A year is a long time in software development!

I do not feel that the fuss being made about buzzer speed is really relevant - within a couple of years faster hardware will probably enable Watson to respond within a small fraction of a second.

The extent to which Watson is a conversational program is not so clear.

I do not feel that the fuss being made about buzzer speed is really relevant - within a couple of years faster hardware will probably enable Watson to respond within a small fraction of a second.

The extent to which Watson is a conversational program is not so clear.

I fully agree with you on both counts. Any system that’s able to give so many correct answers using such a range of possible question forms, is an accomplishment.
But they are not showing any conversational skills. What they have is a very very good query language that requires a bit of umph, but which scales very well with more hardware.

Just last week I heard a short radio interview with one of the members of the Watson-team; when asked if this is actually ‘artificial intelligence’, he stated that the team is not seeing it in that perspective but rather as the next evolution in search and data-mining. I think I read something to that extend on the Watson website as well, in regard to the field where IBM is looking to commercialise this technology.