PC Handyman talks about Watson, the future of education, and our machine overlords

If anyone out there is a Jeopardy fan, you might recall “Man versus Machine Week.” If you prefer Wheel of Fortune, then let us set the stage for you: For 5 days, the greatest champions Jeopardy has ever had were spanked by IBM’s supercomputer Watson. These intellectual giants were beaten so badly that on day 2, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter looked more like Chris Griffin from the Family Guy.  Keep in mind that Jennings is a 74 time champion and Rutter, a 20 time champion. Yet Watson made these geniuses look like 5^th graders.

Anyone wonder what made that possible? Well, the least technical answer has to do with language processing and ranking. Imagine you are a teenager (tough for us) and you are going to miss your curfew. You sit outside and frantically think of 1000 excuses for why you are 2 hours late. If you are successful at getting away with things, in hyper speed you evaluate the 1000 excuses and stack them against every possible way your folks might react while ranking each excuse according to its likelihood of keeping you from losing cellphone privileges. This is what Watson does except it can’t get in trouble.

Watson literally takes a question or problem, and compares it against a library of possibilities (like all of the excuses you’ve used in the past.) Then, it ranks the possibility of an answer being right represented as a confidence score. If you watched Watson in action, you would have noticed that sometimes, Watson was “guessing” because its confidence in the answer being right was lower than at other times.

Some people might be asking who cares? And how does this affect my life? The best way to answer this is with a wishlist of jobs that Watson either could do or is already being hired to do. Try and guess which ones are real and which are jobs just waiting to happen:

1. Customer Service Representative: Watson does not need a coffee break and he never gets sick or annoyed at stupid questions. I bet you have already spoken to Watson (or his lesser known cousin Winston) and someone 6 degrees away from Kevin Bacon has been laid off as a result.

 2.  Medical Assistant: Let’s say you take 20 different pills a day and your medical student, I mean doctor,  is getting ready to not only complete hour 21 of her shift but also prescribe pill #21, Watson knows what you are taking and the side effects of each. She is already letting the doctor know what one medicine mixed with another might do to you. Let’s hope the med student, I mean doctor is awake enough to listen.

3. Financial Watchdog: So, you just got your MBA, bought a suit, and read The Quants; you are ready to start making money in the stock market and you don’t really care who suffers. Along comes Watson who is watching your every move and comparing it to the last time someone on Wall Street made a move without thinking about the social repercussions. Watson cannot be bribed or influenced with a suitcase full of money or stock options.

If you want to see images of possible jobs check out the full article on our website: http://clevelandheightscomputerrepair.com/?p=1088