When I studied the exciting new field of computer science at university some years ago, the university computer (singular) occupied an entire building. I suspect it was about as powerful as the one that I now carry in my shirt pocket. And coming soon to a planet near us?
According to
"IBM Seeks App Developers to Harness Watson" (2014), computer company IBM has begun a competition to encourage software developers to write apps that can make the power of the Watson supercomputer available to everyone through smartphones and tablets, which IBM describes as "game-changing" (para. 5), with possible uses including voice recognition, translation and even expert advice to medical professionals.
I am continually amazed by the technological changes that occurred in my own life time. As I said above, when I first used computers, they filled rooms, where not common, and there were no such things as icons to click. And the internet did not exist. In high school, I was invited to go and play with the computer at the local college, which meant sitting a room with the computer literally surrounding me, looking at a black and white screen and typing FORTRAN or BASIC commands. For the young who don't know, these were ancient programming languages. In the decades since then, we have come a long way. The best chess players in the world are now computers, and Watson is the champion game show player. But when Watson plays, it uses natural language to listen to and answer the questions, which require ... intelligence.
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| The young Watson. |
Or do they require intelligence? Is Watson intelligent in a similar way to human beings, or does it just understand well enough to work out the correct answer? This is the sort of thing that most fascinates me about the rapidly increasing evolution of our thinking machines: are they now reaching a point where they think and understand much like our own brains do? These questions also interest me because I think that they might be able to help us answer ancient questions that have kept scientists, philosophers, psychologists and others puzzling for thousands of years: what is a mind? What is thinking? What is understanding? What is happening in our brains when we understand a sentence or something else? How do our brains create us? Even: what is pain? What is a mental feeling? Whatever the answers are, I'm sure that the next ten years or so will see some amazing progress, and that ever more powerful computers and programs will play increasingly important roles. That progress has already begun: when it beat the human champions in 2011, Watson was "the size of a bedroom, [but] is now the size of three stacked pizza boxes" ("IBM Seeks", 2014, "Trivia King", para. 1). How long before I can slip that much computer power into my shirt pocket?
Where did I get my title for this blog post? Hint: the first version was "Elementary, Dr. Watson," but some research and a bit more thinking suggested the current title. In case you're wondering, I often revise the titles of my blog posts after I've finished writing, but not after I've published them for everyone to read.
IBM seeks app developers to harness Watson. (2014, February 27).
BBC News Technology. Retrieved from
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26366888
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