I’ll have to admit. I watched IBM’s Watson tear apart a couple of geniuses the other day on Jeopardy, and didn’t really understand all the fuss. Frankly, I didn’t understand why Watson had to be so huge. Just hook up a laptop to Wikipedia. They’ll know everything, too.
But, there’s something I wasn’t considering.
Watson is thinking at the speed of genius. Watson is listening, just like we are. Not reading. Racing through his giant computer brain and coming back with the right answer, in less than 2.5 seconds.
It’s wild. And just goes to show you how powerful the human brain is. But the real question is, what’s next for this technology? Well, it looks like Watson will be taking his talents to South Beach… or Nuance Healthcare rather, to help doctors diagnose based on tremendous amounts of data.
This is the exciting stuff.