Elementary, Watson: The Rise of the Anthropomorphic Machine | Big Think

Elementary, Watson: The Rise of the Anthropomorphic Machine
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Eric Siegel never thought he would experience a machine acting in a way that he would subjectively consider to be intelligent. IBM’s Watson, however, changed all of that.
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Eric Siegel:

Eric Siegel, Ph.D. is the founder of the Predictive Analytics World conference series—which includes events for business, government, healthcare, workforce, manufacturing, and financial services—the author of Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die—Revised and Updated Edition (Wiley, January 2016), executive editor of The Predictive Analytics Times, and a former computer science professor at Columbia University. For more information about predictive analytics, see the Predictive Analytics Guide.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Eric Siegel: So I’ve been asked periodically for a couple of decades whether I think artificial intelligence is possible. And I taught the artificial intelligence course at Columbia University. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of intelligence. It’s a subjective word. I’ve always been very skeptical. And I am only now newly a believer. Now this is subjective. This is sort of an aesthetic thing but my opinion is that IBM’s Watson computer is able to answer questions, in my subjective view, that qualifies as intelligence. I spent six years in graduate school working on two things. One is machine learning and that’s the core to prediction – learning from data how to predict. That’s also known as predictive modeling. And the other is natural language processing or computational linguistics.

Working with human language because that really ties into the way we think and what we’re capable of doing and does turn out to be extremely hard for computers to do. Now playing the TV quiz show Jeopardy means your answering questions – quiz show questions. The questions on that game show are really complex grammatically. And it turns out that in order to answer them Watson looks at huge amounts of text, for example, a snapshot of all the English speaking Wikipedia articles. And it has to process text not only to look at the question it’s trying to answer but to retrieve the answers themselves. Now at the core of this it turns out it’s using predictive modeling. Now it’s not predicting the future but it’s predicting the answer to the question, you know. It’s the same in that it’s inferring an unknown even though someone else may already know the answer so there’s no sort of future thing. But will this turn out to be the answer to the question.

The core technology is the same. In both cases it’s learning from examples. In the case of Watson playing the TV show Jeopardy it takes hundreds of thousands of previous Jeopardy questions from the TV show having gone on for decades and learns from them. And what it’s learning to do is predict is this candidate answer to this question likely to be the correct answer. So it’s gonna come up with a whole bunch of candidate answers, hundreds of candidate answers, for the one question at hand at any given point in time. And then amongst all these candidate answers it’s going to score each one. How likely is it to be the right answer. And, of course, the one that gets the highest score as the highest vote of confidence – that’s ultimately the one answer it’s gonna give. It’s correct, I believe, about 90 or 92 percent of the time that it actually buzzes in to intentionally answer the question.

You can go on YouTube and you can watch the episode where they aired the, you know, the competition between the IBM’s computer Watson and the all time two human champions of Jeopardy. And it just rattles off one answer after another. And it doesn’t matter how many years you’ve been looking at – in fact, maybe the more years you’ve studied the ability or inability of computers to work with human language, the more impressive it is. It’s just rattling one answer after another. I never thought that in my lifetime I would have cause to experience that the way I did which was, “Wow, that’s anthropomorphic. This computer seems like a person in that very specific skill set. That’s incredible. I’m gonna call that intelligent.”

[stephennielsen]

Only when a computer can create an original and unique theory will I call it intelligence

[SallyMorem]

I believe Watson was a very large step towards true AI.  Not there yet, but closer.

[Illumirage]

BigThink, so much better than the video with Van Jones' partisan ramblings.

[MarcianusImperator]

From what I understand, Watson is either/both:
1). a statistics calculator - it calculates the likelyhood of one person answering correctly;
2). a hard-drive - search engine - voice recognition hybrid capable of matching spoken words with writen words and searching a database for the right answer.
I might have missunderstood, but if I'm right I wouldn't call Watson "intelligent", not in the least. Again, from what <u><b>I</b></u> understand, Watson is just a very intelligent Siri. It may be quite practical (due to it's quick-to-access large memory storage), but it is not intelligent in the way a human, a monkey or a dolphin is.
If I am wrong, please correct me. :)

[JamesKingunderstandinglife]

What do you think of humans learning to figure out if a single object or group of objects or things are the result of intelligent design? I loved this video because of the way it showed intelligence is not at all simple for us to design into a computer of most massive capabilities.

[jackmillan]

Here's what I consider to be intelligence: CREATING NEW IDEAS/ORIGINAL THOUGHTS. Watson can answer questions better than the two best humans which is VERY impressive, but if a computer can get emotion intelligence down and come to conclusions based on information it knows, I will then consider that entity intelligent and conscious. 

[jimphillips]

Being able to answer a question is considered intelligence?
Well that rules out most politicians.

[Squidward_Tikiland]

if true consciousness could be achived in a machine, it would mean that flesh is not required to produce consciousness. it would mean that consciousness is achived by the existance of a particular material shape, and the material being used is irrelevant as long as it can facilitate the shape and the functionality. it would make consciousness a cosmic form, like Plato's forms. almost as if a spirit comes and inhabits a vessel when it is shaped correctly.

[jpHasABadHandle]

When a machine can both understand and express emotions, not just emulate them, that to me is artificial intelligence.
...But is it then artificial anymore? Do we call it that since it's manmade?

[TobyHorak]

It seems as if he is basing his definition of intelligence on how, because of when he was born, he did not imagine computers being able to do that. For me, that behavior is well within what I EXPECT of a computer. For me, a huge amount of weight in the criteria for intelligence is put on autonomy.

[WrongTimeline]

Thumbs down to his book title, with only a slight abstraction it becomes: "The Power to choose who will die"

[xerHack]

Artificial intelligence is possible; we just need to build an artificial intelligence system that models intelligence.

[CplDabu]

Why don't you guys call it SKYNET? it seams more fitting :)

[ZerosInfinite]

I respectfully disagree with the point being made in this video. Though I do appreciate the argument being made,  the admiration for IBM's Watson, all the effort put in to it and the complexity of the return from it. However to me intelligence is not just knowledge but rather the application of knowledge via wisdom. Seems to me this machine simply has access to a vast bank of knowledge and has a sophisticated algorithm to serve it up, something any human could do with some  paper + pen and access to a library (no where near as fast mind you). But serve this computer any situation that falls outside of the parameters of its "predictive model" and it can be stumped whereas a human will use the creative portion of his or her brain to devise/craft the best solution for that problem based on the available information and their personal experience. I'm not saying this can't be accomplished by a machine, just that I doubt it, as true creativity has an abstract factor to it. I simply find the "for all practical purposes" argument to be insufficient, but I wouldn't presume to be an authority on this topic.. what do you think ?

[pennyshen]

title's misleading... i really thought they were talking about the show elementary lol

[MrRingsten]

I respectfully disagree with the point being made in this video. For me intelligence is rather creativity. It is "easy" to give a computer a very long memory, but from there to draw their own conclusions is probably harder. If you think about it like this. People have created Watson from millions off more or less related things on a to me very kretaiv way, but can a machine to do the same?

[mimilover]

anyone else giggle at: Elementary, Watson?

[Dolphn-Productions]

Try Watson on the our Nation Debt or Obama Care....Maybe the Tax code or the redistribution of wealth in America. I have heard Watson applies for consulting work on line????

[MichaelLTXEllis]

Ironically, its the ability to be "subjective" that gives us real intelligence. When you think about Watson its no more than an idiot savant. And even that takes a super computer to reproduce.. Am I just biased? Of course. But ask Watson an opinion if itself. See if its answer makes any sense. Maybe it will simply answer "42" ;)

[GreatestPotential]

Since intelligence is possible than of course artificial intelligence is possible.