But while that cynical view is certainly technically accurate, I have to admit that when I actually watched Watson play Jeopardy! on TV - and beat the crap out of its human opponents - I felt some real excitement ... and even some pride for the field of AI. Sure, Watson is far from a human-level AI, and doesn't have much general intelligence. But even so, it was pretty bloody cool to see it up there on stage, defeating humans in a battle of wits created purely by humans for humans - playing by the human rules and winning.

I found that Watson's occasional really dumb mistakes made it seem almost human. If the performance had been perfect there would have been no drama - but as it was, there was a bit of a charge in watching the computer come back from temporary defeats induced by the limitations of its AI. Even more so because I'm wholly confident that, ten years from now, Watson's descendants will be capable of doing the same thing without any stupid mistakes.

And in spite of its imperfections, by the end of its three-day competition against human Jeopardy! champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Watson had earned a total of $77,147, compared to $24,000 for Jennings, and $21,600 for Rutter. When Jennings graciously conceded defeat - after briefly giving Watson a run for its money a few minutes earlier - he quoted the line "And I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords."

In the final analysis, Watson didn't seem human at all - its IBM overlords didn't think to program it to sound excited or to celebrate its victory. While the audience cheered Watson, the champ itself remained impassive, precisely as befitting a specialized question-answering system without any emotion module.

But who is this impassive champion, really? A mere supercharged search engine, or a prototype robot overlord?

A lot closer to the former, for sure. Watson 2.0, if there is one, may make fewer dumb mistakes - but it's not going to march out of the Jeopardy! TV studio and start taking over human jobs, winning Nobel Prizes, building femtofactories and spawning Singularities.

But even so, the technologies underlying Watson are likely to be part of the story when human-level and superhuman AGI robots finally do emerge.

Kurzweil on Watson

Ray Kurzweil has written glowingly of Watson as an important technology milestone:

Indeed no human can do what a search engine does, but computers have still not shown an ability to deal with the subtlety and complexity of language. Humans, on the other hand, have been unique in our ability to think in a hierarchical fashion, to understand the elaborate nested structures in language, to put symbols together to form an idea, and then to use a symbol for that idea in yet another such structure. This is what sets humans apart.

That is, until now. Watson is a stunning example of the growing ability of computers to successfully invade this supposedly unique attribute of human intelligence.

I understand where Kurzweil is coming from, but nevertheless, this is a fair bit stronger statement than I'd make. As an AI researcher myself, I'm quite aware of all the subtlety that goes into "thinking in a hierarchical fashion", "forming ideas", and so forth. What Watson does is simply to match question text against large masses of possible answer text, and this is very different than what an AI system will need to do to display human-level general intelligence.

Human intelligence has to do with the synergetic combination of many things, including linguistic intelligence but also formal non-linguistic abstraction, non-linguistic learning of habits and procedures, visual and other sensory imagination, creativity of new ideas only indirectly related to anything heard or read before, etc. An architecture like Watson barely scratches the surface!

But Ray Kurzweil knows all this about the subtlety and complexity of human general intelligence, and the limited nature of the Jeopardy! domain - so why does Watson excite him so much?

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