IBM. HUMAN-crushing SUPERCOMPUTER Watson. The Cloud. You know where THIS is going

GOOD!

...with the possibility of access to UBM professional services

I suppose those are the UBER BUSINESS MACHINES?

Yes, capitalization is important. It conjures up images of evilly spinning tapes and malevolently blinking lights.

The Cyc approach .... dead as disco.

two comments

one silly, one serious:

"Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, 'Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.'" (John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar)

Seriously though, this seems pretty cool. I could see this being akin to databases enabling hordes of engineers and *gasp* business people who weren't experts in efficient storage and retrieval, redundancy, coherence modeling, multithreading, etc. to take advantage of concerted effort by a small few who are. Machine learning has way more cool applications than the people who understand it deeply enough to implement could possibly support piecemeal, and they are unlikely to understand all the subdomains in great enough detail to be the right people to guide that work. I'll be very interested to see how this develops.

My mind is buzzing

I'm thinking of software to play "Liza" for survivors of severe Traumatic Brain Injury. Something to set them in some sort of social environment where "Liza" isn't going to suffer a lapse of patience ever, something to get the TBI survivor's brain adding new neurons.

Quick, where do I sign?

Are we living in a sci-fi B movie?

Connecting the world's foremost artificial intelligence to the internet may seem like a good idea, but don't come crying to me when your Smart Microwave (TM) starts taking over the house.