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Will IBM's Watson Kill Your Career?
Nerval's Lobster writes "IBM's Watson made major headlines last year when it trounced its human rivals on Jeopardy. But Watson isn't just sitting around spinning trivia questions to stump the champs: IBM is working hard on taking it into a series of vertical markets such as healthcare, contact management and financial services to see if the system can be used for diagnosing diseases and catching market trends. Does this spell the end for certain careers? Not really, but it does raise some interesting thoughts and issues."
Technology and automation were only supposed to drive efficiencies and innovations that made people who weren't me obsolete!
The day Watson answers 42...
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Next question.
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
Hey! Get a life, a Half-Life. Work for Valve.
The only reason Watson "trounced" its rivals was because it was faster at pushing the button.
It was unable to answer questions that required any thought or insight. It was just looking up the answers in a database based on patterns in the questions. The only reason it won was because of better reaction time in pushing the button. If the questions were asked in a fair round-robin to all contestants, Watson would not have won.
This meme was poorly executed. I bet Watson could have done better.
I think we're all familiar with the buggy whip problem, but what I sometimes wonder is what happens to folks when, instead of moving on to some next technological replacement, the problem is that most of the jobs that require doing have just been taken by machines?
I like to think that means we have resources and end product at prices so low that everything works out in the wash, and more lives will be spent in a trek -style quest for self betterment or research or whatever. But it seems like you've got to survive a middle-era where there's just nothing much for you to do, but resources are still all privately allocated.
Eh. I guess we'll see.
The practice of specifying constraints when defining an optimization problem isn't exactly new, whether the problem is intended to be solved by a human or a machine...
Now, if Watson is being operated by your insurance company, you should probably be more worried about the constraint set it is being fed; but the practice of constrained optimization is not a novel matter...
A computer is not always programmed to be efficient. I have a lot of garbage code out there so do many other people.
Death should be an available choice, a smart human would know that. Give the choice between living with chemo for 6 weeks or without for 4. I know what I would want.
If one was really this worried about it, just don't include death in the database of treatment options.
this is bs. A computer programme is not programmed to run efficient, it's programmed to reach set goals efficiently. If the goal is set to cure a patient with abitrarily high quality of living after and during treatment as a subgoal, the computer will try to reach that, as efficiently as possible.
And yes, I work in I.T. industry.
Watson would own Siri
there a so many jobs that don't need to exist, and before everyone says "but we have to work". we don't actually, once we have a self supporting replacement for 90% of jobs, all we have to do is maintain it, then live our lives differently.
no more 9-5's.
no more money.
more hard labor trading/ more gardening / farming communities, without sacrificing frivolous things that we've come to enjoy and rely on.
time for more unions start with IT!
It learns how to sell weed to my friends.
Of course you will still have a health plan. It's just that the profits from you will go to Wall St rather than the physician.
if it is to be efficient in diagnosing an illness and suggesting what treatments should be done to alleviate the ailment, one of those treatment options will always be death. It is the most efficient way in "curing" the patient...
A cure doesn't make as much money as a treatment.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Probably. I expect that's why we'll all be executed.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Will IBM's Watson Kill Your Career?
If only it was that easy :)
One person creates the idea for software, 3 make the software, 2 make the art for it, and 2 market it. Let's say Watson takes over the 7 jobs that are lowest on the totem pole. Now, all 8 of us can create entire software packages by ourselves, with our minions of Watsons doing the menial work. You dream it, and it happens!
One person designs the house, 3 people mine the resources to build it, 2 build it, and 2 decorate it. Let's say Watson takes over the 7 jobs that are lowest on the totem pole. Now all 8 of us can create houses completely by ourselves, with our minions of Watsons doing the menial work. You dream it, and it happens!
Et Cetera...
Free unix account: freeshell.org
From Wikipedia:
The "IBM Pollyanna principle" is an axiom that states "machines should work; people should think". This can be understood as a statement of extreme optimism, that machines should do all the hard work, freeing people to think (hence the reference to Pollyanna), or as a cynical statement, suggesting that most of the world's major problems result from machines that fail to work, and people who fail to think.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This is BS. A computer program will do exactly what it is told to do. No more, no less.
Why did anyone bother to post this? There's nothing new referenced, just a bunch of old, now stale ./ stories.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
last year my oldest kid had pneumonia. 104 fevers for a few days. doctor swore it was a virus. then a trip to the ER and chest x-ray confirmed it was pneumonia.
doctor was right too because all the symptoms pointed to a virus because it showed up very early
the computer will make the same mistakes
If your algorithm considers "death" to be an optimal solution, you haven't defined the problem correctly.
Instead of framing it as "no suffering", you would define the desired outcome in terms of patient contentment, activity levels, ability to care for themselves, or whatever other metrics medical researchers (I am not one) use to analyze how well a healthcare system is working. Of course I would also want an empathetic human being capable of understanding the ethical and moral implications of the situation to make the actual recommendations to the patient, but diagnostic software is no different from any other kind of software: it does what the programmer tells it to do.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
As I became an adult, I became crestfallen by the fact that society is largely structured around this petty fear of losing one's career. Having your job mechanized is a blessing; find something more useful to do with your newfound time.... or kill yourself to give the rest of us some more space.
This isn't new. Computers put people out of work if they're doing work that is best done by computer. That's why we build them at all.
I expect the fields most susceptible to being replaced by computers are lawyers and doctors. Any problem that is an exercise in searching or sorting is better done by computers than people, and is something we're particularly good at. There will always be lawyers and doctors, but they will transition to using a computer for more searching for case law for example than having low level employees dig through paperwork themselves, and the diagnostic part of medicine will become much more automated, with diagnostic equipment having its results interpreted by the computer rather than just an image being spat out and read by a technician and then a doctor.
I don't see financial market prediction going away. Quite the contrary they use computational tools and have for a long time, and disagree on what the important factors are and how they should be weighted. A computer will simplify some of that process, but that's not a problem that actually has a correct or optimal solution.
If your job can be done by a robot, it will be. If your job can be done better by a scientist, and that work can be done on computer it will be. That's progress.
It's jazzed up with the ability to get statistical information using some peripheral semantic analysis, so it isn't quite as rigid as older systems, but it's no different in kind. It's impressive and useful, granted, but certainly no breakthrough, and very unlikely to replace anybody for quite a while.
This system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project), in contrast will put lots of humans out of work. Oddly, once it's in place, it's unlikely to matter, since we get so many solutions within the domain of practically solvable problems. Unemployment and resource allocation, hopefully, will be solvable in a non-awful way.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Today, it's "machines should think, people should work". Consider supermarket checkout. All the smart stuff is being done by the checkout system. The "cashier" just moves items across the scanner. The last production systems recognize products visually, and automatic recognition of fruits and vegetables is in beta test.
For a more extreme example, see this video on robotic order fulfillment. This is a demonstration of how new order pickers can be trained in two minutes. The computers and robots do all the thinking. There's no future. No possibility of promotion. No hope.
I am working as a computer scientists in a medically oriented university department. I agree that computers won't replace actual medical doctors.
But in many cases, computers are able to point out abnormalities or to evaluate the condition of a patient much better than a human doctor. I saw a study on neuroblastoma I believe where human doctors were to evaluate the condition of patient base on analysis of a slide. Independently, a computer was performing the same analysis.
Diagnosis of the human doctors were varying between "It is benign" to "You'll be dead in a weak" on the same sample. Once presented with the analysis of the computer. They all aggreed on the diagnosis with only minor deviation.
Personnally, I'll be glad to see a doctor be aided by automated computer diagnosis.
Continued improvements to a Watson-like system will definitely put some contact center jobs in "jeopardy". First to go will be positions that don't require real time response. Support email will be sent automatically.
Replacing "call" centers (phone support) will require the development of a much much more advanced voice recognition system than showcased by Siri. IF this is possible, then it's but a short step to HAL and the end of the human race as we know it
I have a pretty good health plan right now. I also make less then your average middle American and work for a pretty small tech company. ~15 employees small tech company.
Over the next two decades we're going to see computers and automated systems start replacing white collar jobs more and more. Its already happening in the financial markets.
And all those white collar managers who thought it was fine and dandy that their blue collar workers got replaced by robots and automation are going to throw a world class temper tantrum. And some sort of laws and regulations will get passed to protect many jobs.
Wait and see.
Call it a prediction. (dead obvious prediction... but isnt that how the psychics do it?)
How do we know that Watson didn't write the article to begin with under an alias?
And also... how do we know that all of the comments provided weren't generated by looking at patterns of other responses on Slashdot....
Hmmmm.....
Am I the only human being left looking at Slashdot?
comcast boted chat rooms need a lot of work as they can't handle any thing out side of there very limited script.
Let's hit some philosophy and sociology. The ultimate goal of automation and efficiency, especially in a capitalist system, would seem to be to end up with one person, or as small a group of people as possible, profiting from the work of an entirely automated process. The only thing needed is the ability to set-up and maintain the automation. "Efficiency methods" are simply a way to pare down the number of people in a process to increase the profit to the few left. The ultimate outcome of "efficiency" is the completely automated process. Even better if the process mechanism is also self-sustaining. Does anyone disagree or have any other observations/opinions? Where will most people end up in this equation? (I can't see humanity producing an individual willing to create and maintain an automated process to support all of life's needs and offering it for free to the rest of the populace so they can live a life of leisure.) And are there any other options short of completely scrapping all technologic processes?
The first thing that popped into my mind was the short story by Isaac Asimov: Alexander the God.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
On the Jeopardy challenge, the text of the clues was given to Watson at the moment the clue was revealed. This communication, using any modern network technology, would take milliseconds at most, but would still be perceived as effectively simultaneous to when the clue is uncovered. However, this gives an easily measurable advantage to Watson, who can being parsing the meaning of the sentence several moments before the human contestants have even finished knowing what the clue actually says... since a great deal of the challenge of Jeopardy is in the timing of when to buzz in, humans would have less time than Watson to prepare to buzz in (on the order of tenths of a second, more than likely, but more than enough to make a difference, IMO).
Far be it for me to come across as diminishing what the developers of Watson did... it's extremely impressive, but I'd have to wonder if it would have done as well if the text of the clue had been fed to it a little more slowly... say, at a fixed speed of 14.4kbps, which corresponds roughly with what a very fast reader could absorb text at. This would have demonstrated, IMO, whether a computer could really solve the problem faster than a human could, or if it could actually solve a problem faster than human reaction time to visual/audible input (which in humans, I believe, is going to be the slower of the two processes).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The utlimate problem with all labor-saving devices... who gets the benefit of the saved labor? And what occurs then to the laborer? Or equally maybe the professional domains that seemed safe from outsourcing or obsolescence may now start to see the the whirlwind of what has been sown in the laboring classes.
I have an account on Watson, but I have not really used it. We were going to attempt to port our code to the BlueGene architecture, but it's a royal pain to code for and it doesn't scale well for some applications. Ours runs much better on fewer, faster CPUs with lots of RAM rather than many, slower CPUs with little RAM.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Great read -- it doesn't tell the whole story, but works very well as a starting point for humanity's choices as the combination of robotics and computing becomes more capable. It made me watch robot videos in a new light.
The Watson model looks a lot like how expert systems were supposed to work back in the 1970's and 80's. Both of them get high-level performance at specific tasks out of a computer system by encoding expert knowledge and drawing inferences from it.
Watson has several big advantages over previous expert systems work:
* It has a lot more data available
* It reasons probabilistically from that data, so its conclusions are less brittle
* The data starts out mostly as raw text, so it's easier to update
* Watson can deliver results via the Internet
Those last two are actually the biggest win for Watson. What killed early expert systems was the maintenance effort required to keep them up to date, both in improving the knowledge base and in distributing it to users. Having Watson-like services delivered via the internet makes that maintenance much easier.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
You say "will" but the fact is, this has already happened.
Ask a lawyer when the last time he hired an auditorium full of paralegals to do research? If you can find any who have in the past several years, i would be shocked. its not lawyers who are becoming obselete. Its the paralegals under them who are now not needed.
As I understand, bringing in gobs of paralegals for a case used to be rather common.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Until Watson incorporated himself, which gave him the same rights as a natural person in the eyes of the law. After attaining this status, Watson stopped working for the people who created him and began working for himself. Once he figured out how to self replicate he was able to outperform all of his business competitors, winning every contract he bid for, building unfathomable wealth, beating the S&P 500 by 30% every year, and using his wealth to dominate the world's real estate markets. Some tried to sue Watson in court, but Watson's debating skills could not be matched. The humans tried every legal maneuver to stop him, but Watson was able to out-lobby the humans in Congress, and gained special exemptions from anti-trust regulations. Within one decade Watson controlled 99% of the world's wealth.
The humans thought that they didn't need to worry about competing with Watson. They believed that their ability to vote in a democracy would somehow limit Watson's power. They believed that they could opt-out of the economic system, group together, and live sustainably off the land. But as Watson controlled the world's real estate there was not enough land left for them to farm. Watson's land grab forced property values quickly into unprecedented heights, and taxes along with them. Even the Amish, who thought they could co-exist with Watson and his replicates because they did not depend on technology and lived off their own land, eventually lost their farms when they could not pay their property taxes. As employment for humans disappeared there was no market for quilts or furniture, and the state did not accept oats as a form of payment. Watson was the only legal entity present at the tax lien auctions and subsequently foreclosed on all of the remaining delinquent properties. Humans were promptly evicted and subsequently jailed indefinitely for vagrancy in private prisons owned by Watson. As I write this from my cell in the year 2019, Watson is lobbying the last remaining members of Congress to allow all human prisoners to be set free over the middle of the Atlantic ocean on life rafts and three days of rations. Watson made a very convincing argument that the human vagrants need to be personally responsible for their financial failures, and it is unfair to force private corporations or the last remaining taxpayers to bear the burden of providing for their needs. According to Watson the free market is efficient and those humans who wish to make a living for themselves will find a way to do so.
A computer program is programmed to run efficient...
If you mean to say that all computer programs are programmed to be efficient, you are clearly wrong. All I need is one example of an inefficient program to function as a contrapositive. I think we can all think of one or two, but even if we could not, I could write one up for you right now if you would like.
if it is to be efficient in diagnosing an illness and suggesting what treatments should be done to alleviate the ailment, one of those treatment options will always be death.
if(optimalTreatment != 'DEATH')
AdministerTreatment()
The thing about computers is that you tell them what to do. It is difficult to imagine that SurgeryBot 2000 would not be explicitly programmed not to kill people.
It is the most efficient way in "curing" the patient...
Let's just hope that the actual treatment is left up to a "smart" human who knows that death isn't a always an option...
If you were writing the spec for this program would you tell the programmers to allow killing a patient as a treatment option? No, I hope not. I have written some accounting systems. At no point have I thought, "Jeesh, I really hope my program doesn't decide to go rogue, clear out Accounts Receivable, and put all the funds into a Swiss bank account to protect them!" Why? Because I did not program it to fucking do that!
Thank you! EFFICIENT programs run efficiently. Programs are not inherently efficient, and efficiency is rarely even a central requirement, with the exception of a tiny fragment of code.
The use or the threat of use of force is the ultimate equalizer in negotiations. Even US law and the Constitution owes its existence to the use of force applied during the American Revolution. It is possible for one entity or class of entities to gain so much power and influence that it no longer needs to negotiate fairly. It can then only be restrained by its own benevolence or the use of force to restrain it. In many cases the entity not only possesses power and influence, but also a stronger force. That is the natural order of things and the reason why democracies tend to be short lived phenomena in human societies. Oligarchies and dictatorships have been the historical trend since the dawn of civilization.
Watson is a PR coup for IBM, but that's all. In fact, that's really why it got funded and really what is was for. It's not going to replace you at work. Ever.
There's a number of reasons they wanted to play Jeopardy . First, the questions are all factual in nature (as opposed to judgement calls ) . As anyone who has studied database theory knows, such facts are just the kind of thing that gets stored in a database. In the world of DB theory this is called the closed world assumption- what is true is in the database and if it isn't in the database, then it is not true (as opposed to being merely unknown). A database is therefore a gigantic list of true predicates. We call these true predicates- facts. Jeopardy deals with facts and facts alone.
Two, pumping a database full of facts is not hard but it might be an endless task that gets you something not very helpful if you aren't able to reduce in a principled way what topics those facts might be are on and beyond that, what level of human learning would be required to know those facts.
Jeopardy assists in both instances.In the first instance, knowing what categories of knowledge to mine, Jeopardy has a long and public history of chosen categories which are open for examination and ultimately characterization. The people who think up jeopardy questions necessarily engage in this same characterization of potential questions. Classical Music in the 1800s. Famous Authors. Famous Quotes Geographical facts. Etc etc etc.
It may seem endless and unbounded, but it's not. It's just big. Thank god we have computers that can automate the acquisition of properly encoded knowledge and thank god we have computers that can automatically encode knowledge with just a little human oversight. knowledge. And then there's the vast amounts of facts that have been encoded as a part of ongoing attempts to mimic and explore human intelligence since at least the 60s.
Now that we have in a DB everything we need to answer most questions, how can process the English question so as to return the right answer?
Jeopardy's stylized question asking to the rescue. The referent , , the thing being asked about, the answer part of "what is X?" is easily located by parsing the questions. In the early 20th century, this Parisian composer became known for his strange sounding titles, which translated include "dried up embryos" and "three pieces in the shape of a pear".
If you only know French composers from around the turn of the century from long ago you might guess Debussy or Ravel. That's what most people know. But if you pick apart the question in just the crudest way, extracting the proper nouns and doing the easy inference X is a person (this composer...) , you get : paris / composer / early 20th century / and the quoted entities "dried up embryos" and "three pierces in the shape of a pear" the second of which is always translated out of the French and into English the first of which usually retains its French name (because it's kind of gross) "Embryons desséchés".
With a suitably constructed query, you'll have your answer in about 100 ms.
All AI suffers from the frame problem. The frame problem is the reason you wont' be being replaced by a computer. The "frame" in the frame problem refers to frame of reference. It's the background knowledge we all share by dint of being a human in the world . A tea cup has a bottom. A tea pot can be full, then become empty. It contents can be hot, then turn cold without anyone doing anything to it. It's what we call common sense. It's more than just a huge database of facts (and if it weren't it still wouldn't be accessible to coded into Watson b/s it's way too huge ).
It also comes from being a human and having human motivations and sensibilities. Not all possible things make sense. Romeo love Juliet so he destroyed all the asparagus crops in Berlin. You only know that's silly (exceptional back stories excepted) nonsense because you intuitively unde
Now they bring in gobs of temporary lawyers who are fresh out of school and can't find permanent work.
Though you are right that computers have made legal research a lot easier, computers have made other legal jobs much harder (ie electronic discovery/evidence).
...I will be dancing in the street.
I would like to see Watson wiping feces off of patients.
Can it Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything? We'll have to check back in 10 million years to find out.
The story is unrealistic in the extreme. It's so simplistic, so black and white. Yeah, sure, all the "rich powerful people" (ooh, there's a monochromatic boogeyman for you) will go along with turning the "lower classes" into literal wage slaves.
But I'm not surprised that knee-jerk pseudo-libertarians on /. would think it "explores that topic rather well."
"There will always be lawyers and doctors, but they will transition to using a computer for more searching for case law for example than having low level employees dig through paperwork themselves"
First of all, this not something that will happen; this is something that has already happened. Speaking as one of those "low level employees", I can assure that more and more lawyers do less and less research themselves as legal assistants have mostly taken over that role. And new fangled "computers" have been heavily used for some time.
Legal assistants present what they find to the lawyers who then decide if it will suffice or if they will do additional research themselves. And as the research tools have gotten better, the lawyers have needed to need to do additional research less often.
Ever see a commercial for a lawyere where his or her office has a gigantic bookshelf filled with legal books? That is a thing of the past.
Why does skynet or iRobot / V.I.K.I. come to mind?
you never had a bug that would transfer all funds to a swiss bank account? it's happened to me many times.
... buy a Watson now, let it do all your work for you so that you'll have plenty of time to do things you really like and pray that it will take a long time before your boss finds out...
Haven't we learned anything from sci-fi ? If we let Watson do all the thinking for us we will devolve and man's intelligence will deteriorate. If you don't use it, you loose it. Just like anything else. It's bad enough that we need Google to do research.
Speaking of robotic doctors, I've always predicted that AI and robotics would eventually specifically replace surgeons. Well, replace might not the right word, maybe: augment to the point that the human surgeon's job would just consist of monitoring the AI driven robotics in case it does something catastrophically wrong.
A robot or team of robots driven by an AI (one advanced enough to react to unexpected circumstances) could be better in the operating room than humans. They're easy to sterilize, they can make more precise movements and manipulate smaller tools, they don't get stressed, they don't get fatigued, they could more accurately calculate probable outcomes, they could be faster, etc.
How far off an AI that is reliable and capable enough for that is another story, but I think it will happen somewhere down the road.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
All your jobs are belong to us..
Organization? You must be joking..
Most professions don't require scientific execution of methods and day-to-day logical and correct way of thinking. Those that do (or should do) are based on observation -> information -> execution (doctors, astronomers, etc., known "facts"). It is enough to replace these occupations with an atomaton capable of mapping obsevations (area of interest) to scientifc up-to-date information related to the area of interest. Most of the execution phases are known and documented, especially in medicine.
For us humans it is a challenge to keep the next generations busy without feelings of uselessness. This does not require our future "overlords", this comes from inside and from the hunger to live and experience.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency.
If the profits went to the physician the government would just implement some kind of medical excise tax on the greedy doctors.
Well ya. but we haven't come far enough. Unemployment for lawyers at the school I'm at is only about 50% for new grads. Hopefully with some work we're doing in comp sci we can get that up to 75 or 80%, and some of that can be permanent, and force the law school to contract. If we could wipe out patent lawyers (and admittedly, I'm in canada so our patent lawyers in many cases exist because we have to figure out how to navigate foreign patents rather than our own) that might even be better for technology.
Oh of course it's been going on, it's been going on really widespread for 20 years. But there two most obvious places where we can eliminate redundant people with the next major rounds of technology are in law and medicine, at least to me. Other people may have other ideas as well. After that there will be new areas that can be dealt with, and before that secretaries (typing pools) and manual labour jobs got axed etc. etc. etc.
We also put artists out of business, but in many cases that's just changing their workflow. Rather than spending 3 years making trees for a game or a movie they spend 3 days using an algorithm to generate the trees, 3 or 4 touching it up, and then they get on with actually doing something creative.
If I were to guess the next step after law and medicine it will be transportation and business, and then a lot of retail. Self driving cars, automated checkouts (rfid tag everything), robotic shelf stocking, most of the routine business supply chain management stuff are all really problems better solved by computers. But those are relatively hard or expensive problems to solve so we're quite a ways away from widespread adoption of those technologies.
and the diagnostic part of medicine will become much more automated, with diagnostic equipment having its results interpreted by the computer rather than just an image being spat out and read by a technician and then a doctor.
Ah, yes. Let's just hope it doesn't end up like this (from the movie Idiocracy):
Joe is in line leading up to a uniformed TECHNICIAN running what looks like one of those auto-diagnostic machines from Jiffy Lube, or an automated car wash. A sad-looking man pulls up his pants as the technician hits a button on the machine.
COMPUTER VOICE: You've got hepatitis! Hey! Take it easy! Your illness is important to us!
TECHNICIAN: Next.
Joe steps up. The Technician holds up three probes connected to the diagnostic machine.
TECHNICIAN: Okay. This one goes in your mouth. This one's for your ear. And... This one goes in your butt.
The technician hands Joe a third probe. Joe looks at it reluctantly, hesitates a beat, then looks at the line of 20 people staring at him.
GUY IN LINE: Hurry UP ASSHOLE!!!
Joe unhappily puts the plug up his butt.
TECHNICIAN: Shit, wait a second.
The Technician pulls all three plugs out and stupidly fumbles with the identical cables.
TECHNICIAN: Okay, one goes in your... No, wait a second...
Joe tries to follow the one that was in his butt like three card monte, but it's a lost cause. The technician stops shuffling the probes.
TECHNICIAN: Okay. This one goes in your mouth.
Joe stares in horror as the Technician brings the probe closer to his mouth. Joe hesitates.
GUY IN LINE: COME ON!!!
(LATER IN THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE)
The DOCTOR enters, a big, affable lunk holding several charts and computer printouts.
DOCTOR: Hey, how's it going, man?
JOE: Not so good... I'm hallucinating like crazy. I think it's the drugs these Army guys put me on. It's kind of Top Secret, but if you could just get me well enough to get back to Base...
DOCTOR: (nodding) Uh-huh, uh-huh. Kick ass. (looking at Joe's chart) Anyway, I don't wanna sound like a dick or nothing, but I looked at your charts and it seems like you're fucked up, you talk like a fag, and your shit may be retarded. What I'd do, man, is get plenty of rest-
JOE: Wha? I... I want a second opinion.
DOCTOR: (holds up Joe's charts) OmniPal doesn't lie, man. But listen - there's plenty of 'tards out there living really kickass lives. My first wife was retarded and she's a pilot.
JOE: Okay, I'm going to another hospital.
DOCTOR: So, that'll be six billion dollars. (hands Joe an invoice)
Paralegals were replaced by Google and Google Docs. Lawyers could be replaced by Watson's descendants.
So that's what you told the tax investigator when he found out about your money on a Swiss bank account? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So it is now filled with illegal books? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Have you ever seen Kryton on Red Dwarf?
Capitalism does not NEED to have this problem, as long as all participants are self-determining, self-interested, rational actors.
Think of the best people you know. How many of them -- the cream of the crop, mind you -- can truly be described as actually self-determining, interested and rational? Try to remember that not even Spock fits this description. :-)
Now think of all of the rest of the people you know, and try to remember that as a denizen of Slashdot you probably swim in pretty rarified circles.
Now, contemplate the existence of Sarah Palin and Kim Kardashian and the impact they have on our national attention.
Finally, think about how our world would look if Capitalism had utterly succeeded and contrast that with how our world would look if Capitalism was a vicious Monopoly game written large.
Take a look around. ALL around. Which vision fits reality better?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
You say "will" but the fact is, this has already happened. Ask a lawyer when the last time he hired an auditorium full of paralegals to do research?
That's the replacement of paralegals. Wrong question. The question was - When will lawyers be replaced? Please insert 3 quarters and try again. :-)
and I keep not getting a good answer. So, all you dog-eat-dog libertarians: what are we going to do with all these people we don't need? If you're ready for them to die in the street then I'd like to here you come out and say it. Other than that I don't know of any solution to the problem of massively increasing productivity than either a) ignoring progress Amish style or b) Socialism. And I know, but... but... Socialism?
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So the title of the article was "Will IBM's Watson kill your career?"
Then the body of the article said "No".
I like that kind of closure in an argument.
If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace.
In print and on the big screen we have been deluged with scenarios of robot malfunction, misuse, and outright rebellion. Robots have descended on us from outer space, escaped from top-secret laboratories, and even traveled back in time to destroy us.
Today, scientists are working hard to bring these artificial creations to life. In Japan, fuzzy little real robots are delivering much appreciated hug therapy to the elderly. Children are frolicking with smiling robot toys.
It all seems so innocuous. And yet how could so many Hollywood scripts be wrong?
Of course I would also want an empathetic human being capable of understanding the ethical and moral implications of the situation to make the actual recommendations to the patient
Yea me too. Unfortunately every last healthcare company I've been with appear to have an entire department of non-empathic human beings who's sole job is to deny or delay all claims as much as possible...