eMike
Good bye to tech support and telemarketing in 10 to 20 years as soon as this is perfected and sold to global corporations.
Facebook User
About time, now we can replace lawyers with Watson.
joeblake
Many years ago science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a story called "Franchise" in which the fictional supercomputer "Multivac" determined the result of the 2008 US presidential election by questioning a single voter, Norman Muller, and using the data obtained to calculate the likely outcome of a "full" election.
Although initially reluctant, after "voting", Muller is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise" – a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens did not actually get to vote.
How long till reality catches up with art?
Daishi
The couple times I have contacted tech support via email the human rep grabbed /maybe/ 2 or 3 keywords out of scanning my email and sent me a canned response. Watson couldn't do worse. Ditto for calling a company on the phone and trying to navigate their phone tree to do something simple.
In the corporate world there is a big need for people making decisions to be able to analyze a lot of data and/or send subordinates on tasks of fetching specific data points to assist a decision. I could see a lot of uses for Watson.
eMike
My experience in IT and processes leads me to believe that jobs are always at stake. The guys on top are sociopaths. I know them, and used to work for them.
cattleherder
Clever IBM marketing, but I'm surprised how the entire world swallows it.
"Listing arguments" is hardly the same as "debating". Debating involves managing dialogue, tracking the opponent's train of thought, and counter-attacking. Listing arguments is basically an exercise in entity extraction, which has been around forever.
A canned demo without a possibility to inspect results means it's just as ready for the real world as the rest of Watson.
Snake Oil Baron
Now if it could examine the arguments it discovers, evaluate the supporting data for them in literature and statistics and alter it's knowledge base to reflect which side is probably correct (while allowing the possibility for new changes) it would be an even bigger deal.
Chris Hobson
Humans are finished.
Danila Medvedev
I guess Dario doesn't have the skills that Watson has, because he chose not to google the Watson's "arguments". If he did, he would easily find out that all of them were copied verbatim from various Wikipedia articles (sometimes old versions, because they used an offline copy). Here they are:
PRO http://wpedia.goo.ne.jp/enwiki/Video_game_controversy http://dictionary.sensagent.com/ADOLESCENCES/en-en/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversies
and CON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Childhood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversies
Not to mention the fact that pro arguments 2 and 3 ignore the context of the sentence. In 2 Watson says exactly the opposite of what the author said (Watson ignores the start of the sentence: "However, it is highly debated whether...". In 3 the end of the sentence is ignored — "but that parents moderate the negative effects." Also, 3 basically repeats what 1 and 2 said.
Arguments con 2 and 3 are not logically sound.
asdf
"Costs one million dollars"
10 years from now... it will run on my phone :}