{"id":1400,"date":"2011-02-17T07:16:13","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T11:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=1400"},"modified":"2011-02-17T21:00:27","modified_gmt":"2011-02-18T01:00:27","slug":"watson-the-benevolent-boy-king-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2011\/02\/17\/watson-the-benevolent-boy-king-of-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Watson: The Benevolent Boy King of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I attended a viewing and panel discussion for the final episode of Jeopardy! IBM Challenge<\/a><\/em> in which IBM\u2019s Watson supercomputer<\/a> beat reigning champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a 3-night challenge of standard Jeopardy! games. Check out my previous post <\/a>to read more about the tech behind Watson and what IBM hopes to do with this impressive technology.\u00a0 This post will focus more on the public perception of Watson, and what it means to have a technology that is credited with producing very accurate conclusions based on complex data.<\/p>\n

The panel discussion and viewing event was hosted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute <\/a>in Troy, NY.\u00a0 In the interest of full disclosure- I am currently enrolled as an M.S.\/Ph.D student in RPI\u2019s Science and Technology Studies Dept.\u00a0 It\u2019s also worth noting that Principal Investigator, David Ferrucci; research scientist Chris Welty; and Senior Software Engineer Adam Lally, are all RPI alumni.<\/p>\n

I asked a few RPI students, during the preceding reception, two questions: 1) what they foresaw as the first application of Watson, and 2) whether or not they were afraid of Watson.\u00a0 A group of three guys, Alex, Sean, and Thomas wanted to see this technology replace the Google algorithm or WebMD. \u00a0Two women, Anna and Karen, repeated what they\u2019d heard the previous night, that Watson would be a tool to deal with \u201cinformation overload.\u201d\u00a0 For the second question, all five students seemed puzzled.\u00a0 How could a machine that sorts data, be evil?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To me, Watson is dangerous because of how people react to it, not what it does.\u00a0 The panel, which consisted of Adam Lally, Chris Welty, and several others, was asked whether humans are capable of \u201ctrusting a machine.\u201d\u00a0 Dr. Lally\u2019s response was, \u201cThe confidence values build trust.\u201d Chris elaborated by noting that Watson provides a precise percentage of certainty, while a human will most likely say, \u201cI\u2019m certain.\u201d\u00a0 The panel even collectively considered the possibility of government officials asking a Watson-like computer, how to solve the economic crisis.<\/p>\n

When someone came to the microphone and asked the panel whether or not this was a technology that they should be making, the panel looked generally confused.\u00a0 Chris jokingly (I think) said \u201cMake sure I\u2019m the one in power.\u201d\u00a0 RPI\u2019s Department head and professor of Cognitive Science concluded that as long as an embodied Watson-like machine in a combat scenario had some sort of \u201cacceptable risk\u201d algorithm, it would be ethically sound.\u00a0 None of the panelists believed that \u201cthe singularity<\/a>\u201d was a realistic probability worthy of discussion.<\/p>\n

Overall, I think we need to be worried about who has access to, what I would call, a \u201cTruth Machine.\u201d\u00a0 Because as long as it retains its reputation as a fount of 98% certain Truth, access to the machine (and the credibility it bestows) will remain with power elites. Will these machines prove \u201ctrickle-down economics?\u201d\u00a0 Or will the most efficient solution be a command-economy with a central executive?\u00a0 But maybe a less radical question is: Will this machine be used to end poverty, or to calculate optimal mutual fund portfolios?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I attended a viewing and panel discussion for the final episode of Jeopardy! IBM Challenge in which IBM\u2019s Watson supercomputer beat reigning champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a 3-night challenge of standard Jeopardy! games. Check out my previous post to read more about the tech behind Watson and what IBM hopes to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[39,1067,884,13,10332,119,10430,10330],"class_list":["post-1400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-ethics","tag-human","tag-ibm","tag-inequality","tag-jeopardy","tag-poverty","tag-super-computer","tag-watson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1407,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions\/1407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}