Entertainment
Man vs Machine
We can’t predict the future and perhaps the next revolution in technology will come in the form of advanced robotics or even something we haven’t imagined yet. But for what it’s worth, IBM’s Watson is, for now, the most advanced AI and it may change the way we interact with technology altogetherPrajesh SJB Rana
Ever since the dawn of human civilisation, people have always striven to make tasks easier. Humans have molded their surroundings in ways that help them survive. This is highlighted spectacularly in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic Si-Fi thriller, 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most famous jump cut in film history. Kubrick’s film starts in a desolate landscape inhabited by man-apes that learn to use a bone as a tool of violence to reclaim something they have lost. This scene ends with a cut, a morph from this simple bone weapon to a highly complex spaceship that has technology to create artificial environments to supplement human habitation. The movie was a look into the future when released in 1969, but now, with what humanity has done with technology, it doesn’t look very far off. We have succeeded in creating virtual systems that separates us from reality, tools complex enough to mimic how the world looks and reacts to us.
Technology is ever-developing. In the 1970s, one of the most influential advancements in computer technology, the Microprocessor, was created. The Microprocessor made it possible for computing units to come in a smaller form factor and process data in various different ways. With the ability of the microprocessor to accept commands, understand data, process information, and output desired information, computing became smarter and intuitive. This advancement brought us the personal computer. During the same time, another tool that would change the world as we knew it was under development but didn’t impact communication as a whole until the 1990s. This tool was the internet. The internet, today, is an integral part of our lives. Approximately 40 percent of the world’s population is connected to it, and more than three billion people in the world have access to the internet.
In recent years, we’ve seen 3D printers capable of printing artificial organs ready for human transplant to a complex decentralised economic system with its own
currency called Bitcoin. We now live in such an age where human achievement is not limited by technology.
It pushes us to ask an important question: What next?
Technological change could now come in the form of advanced robotics or real-world simulations; it might also come in the form of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that rivals the human brain. This brings us to IBM’s advanced artificial intelligence capable of cognitive reasoning and machine learning—the IBM Watson.
At its core, IBM’s Watson is a super-computer equipped with about 2800 processor cores paired with 16 terabytes of RAM. But Watson is more than just the hardware it runs on—its highlight is its software. Watson is a highly complex AI system that has the ability to understand natural language, scan and understand huge amounts of data, and actually construct arguments and answers. Watson is not the first smart AI and we have been exposed to different forms of AI for quite some time now. Google has been implementing complex AI algorithms to learn from your internet browsing to create an internet that is specifically tailored to your interests. Facebook has been doing this, as well, with their complex face-recognition AI, as well as the AI used in their non-intrusive AD algorithms. We have been interacting with smart artificial intelligence systems like Siri and Google Now for some time now.
To put it simply, Watson has the ability to not only identity important words and phrases you search for,
but to actually understand natural language and provide answers that are constructed by the AI, researching the vast sea of information that is the internet. Watson reacts to a question like any human mind would, by collecting as much information that it can about the topic and creating a reasoned answer to these questions. To put this into a better perspective, Watson was initially created to compete against human players in the game of Jeopardy!, a highly complex game that requires advanced understanding of cryptic questions and advanced machine reasoning to identify the most correct answer from a sea of probable answers. This means that the computer not only needs to learn from the information provided on the internet but actually understand the context of the questions that are being asked. This is possible because Watson does not interpret questions like traditional AI systems but actually learns from thousands of examples. It creates a pattern from these examples and handles any information it is asked by mechanically learning from these examples. By 2011, however, Watson was not only capable of competing with the most celebrated Jeopardy! players like Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, but actually could beat them by leagues. What is even more impressive is that Waston could learn from its mistakes, without any human intervention, and rectify it.
Watson has come a long way since its 2011 Jeopardy! days, and is currently deployed to make smart diagnostic and treatment decisions regarding Lung Cancer treatments at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center based in New York City. The implementation has been such a
success that many of the nurses at the center admit to frequently taking advice from the computer. Apart from Watson’s implementation in the medical sector, Watson is also being used within banks to facilitate their financial services. Looking at Watson’s growth and its successful implementation in many specialised fields, it is clear that Watson is capable of providing accurate answers to any question we throw at it—given it has access to ample research material. As of 2013, IBM has announced that they will be providing Watson development kits for software developers and this will no doubt increase the capabilities of Watson and also bring to light the idea of Watson appearing on our mobile devices. In fact, Watson already has a mobile persona on the iPad for medical professionals.
We can’t predict the future and perhaps the next revolution in technology will come in the form of advanced robotics or something we haven’t imagined yet. But for what it’s worth, IBM’s Watson is, for now, the most advanced AI we have experienced and may change the way we interact with technology altogether. Just like the famous jump cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey, from the humble beginnings of learning to use bones as weapons, we have jumped into an era where we’ve created tools with reasoning, understanding and learning— a tool that might become smarter than us.