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."

Comments

Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!!

[h4rr4r]

The real question is what do we do when it makes 90% of jobs unneeded?
I would love to think star trek, but dystopia is far more likely than utopia.

Betteridge's law of headlines wins again

[cmorriss]

"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

Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!!

[Hatta]

People can never be made obsolete. Only jobs can be made obsolete.

And again, like I say in every one of these topics, if the benefits of increased efficiency do not accrue to the entire economy, that's a problem with the economic system, not the increased efficiency. Ideally, increased efficiency should abolish the need for some work allowing us to spend more of our time doing things we want. The fact that it actually ends up enriching the rich and leaving the working classes (and now the thinking classes) destitute is a fundamental problem with capitalism.

Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My understanding is that we hire ~10% of the surplus to guard the prisons that hold the remainder.

Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!!

[i kan reed]

It's not a fundamental problem with capitalism; it's a (very slowly) emerging consequence. Capitalism does not NEED to have this problem, as long as all participants are self-determining, self-interested, rational actors. It's just that all 3 of those points are, at best, approximately true or true for most participants. The introduction of AI into the equation just adds actors who aren't self-determining(the goals of their decisions are predefined) or self-interested(they are programmed/trained to be interested in their owner's success). That will eventually collapse the system, if prevalent enough.

For the moment, though, there are enough tasks that humans are better at than computers that this does not need to be a concern. 50 years from now, being in a true capitalist economy will make your life hell.

Re:Watson is a better button pusher

[tverbeek]

So your argument seems to be that Watson was almost as good at finding the correct answer (otherwise his fast reaction time would not have helped him), but won only because he was faster. But in most jobs, being a fraction of a second faster/slower is not particularly important. Furthermore, being almost-as-good, but doing so 100% of the time 24/7/365, and requiring only electricity and routine maintenance... would be rather attractive to a lot of employers.

Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!!

[Hatta]

Capitalism does not NEED to have this problem, as long as all participants are self-determining, self-interested, rational actors.

Assuming all those things, how would capitalism solve this problem? If you only need the labor of 1/10th of 1 percent of the population to support the entire population, how does the other 99.9% earn their keep?

The only answer is by encouraging people to buy things they don't need. But that just means people need to work more to buy things they don't need. Which destroys the whole point of increasing efficiency in the first place.