Intelligent Agents
Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer, trumps humans (video) – “A fascinating and insightful update on Watson, IBM’s computer being developed to appear on Jeopardy and compete with humans using the same game playing rules.”
From DSC:
This is both exciting and potentially-disturbing to me. At times, I don’t like to cover a lot of things related to artificial intelligence (AI) — as the motivations of those seeking advances in AI are sometimes suspect to me and at times border on arrogance — but to turn my head and ignore everything that’s happening in this area is not helpful either.
The disturbing part lies in who uses such technology and for which purposes. The exciting part is how intelligent agents can work for us. In fact, I created the following graphic back in May 2008 (with slight edits on the wording made today):
Also see:
Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge – Even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilization runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?