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Will IBM's Watson Kill Your Career?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the just-don't-give-it-control-over-airlocks dept.

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."

3 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Betteridge's law of headlines wins again by cmorriss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.
  3. Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.