It wasn’t too long ago when Kasparov signalled his defeat in front of Deep Blue, IBM’s master chess machine. With 200 million calculations per second, the human mind had been out-calculated by its A.I.. Was this the start of the demise of the need for human calculation? Would A.I. take over our need to think for ourselves?
The GPS has become a ubiquitous travelling machine, suspending our need to coordinate directions to a destination. Our minds are preoccupied with other thoughts of driving, work related tasks, etc. Not only is our calculated thought suspended, so is our memory. I know people who travel to a certain destination routinely and still don’t know the proper directions to the destination, only because they solely rely on the GPS to do it for them all the time. Is this good for us?
Watson relies on three key areas to play Jeopardy: 1) a knowledge base of articles, encyclopedia, and various information 2) linguistic skills to formulate responses, and 3) a self-correcting algorithm. Applications for all of these areas are deeply applicable to vast spans of human activity. Watson used knowledge sources such as Wikipedia to scour through for answers. Imagine the great use of having a machine answer trivia and other questions, in developing effective teaching mediums for students querying certain information to constructing textbooks and teaching materials.
If we are able to apply Watson’s A.I. for certain individual tasks such as the applicability of Watson in network administration, an area where Soulistech specializes, possible solutions could touch upon:
- QOS: Prioritizing network traffic intelligently
- Provide better network diagnosis of problems
- Predict network failures and future demands
- Apply intelligent security measures for data networks
- Aggregate data and formulate support bases
I see the use of Watson like machines in many areas such as providing better automated tech support on behalf of many companies, detecting and troubleshooting network problems, and being a better teacher assistor in schools.
Dcoderr 