Watson Essay

Watson: The Extraordinary Computer.
Technology has been able to make life easier and more comfortable for humans, plants and animals. Artificial Intelligence on the other hand has been able to solve some problems beyond human capacity. Artificial intelligence alongside natural intelligence is what Stephen Hawking uses for his creative thinking and to communicate. Artificial intelligence is more than just computers and software. Over the years, computers have been developed in terms of size, shape and speed. Computing systems have been available for over 200 years, ranging from the Chinese abacus to Charles Babbage’s first macro computer. Computers have become more advanced especially this digital age. Several computer companies have been creating

Watson had its debut appearance to the public in 2010. Watson was one of the three contestants in the game show Jeopardy! and Watson won the competition. Watson’s artificial intelligence is so acute that it was able to beat two humans in the game show Jeopardy! . Watson’s ability to defeat two human competitors in Jeopardy! created a lot of criticism for the computer and its developers. Jaron Lanier in the The Best American Science Writing 2012 criticized the appearance of Watson in Jeopardy! Jaron believes that including Watson as a contestant in the game show was a bad idea. Jaron says that Watson “presented a misleading picture to the public to the public of what is known about machine and human intelligence” (89). Jaron Lanier’s reasons for condemning Watson’s appearance on Jeopardy in his article “It’s Not a Game”, is because, “Watson was presented as an entity instead of a technology” (90). Jaron Lanier believes that human intelligence and a machine’s artificial intelligence should not be compared (91). Michael Moyes in his article “Watson Looks For Work,” says that the computer was able to win because it was preloaded with 200 million pages of encyclopedias, newspapers and works of literature (“Watson Looks For Work”). The two things that fascinated the world is that Watson was able to defeat the top two human competitors that have ever been on Jeopardy! and Watson is able to understand natural language which is English. Watson was able to partake in the competition because of its natural language processing ability. Dr. Ramon A. Mata-Toledo explains Watson’s natural language processing as an “intrinsic nature of accepting sentences” (“Natural Language Processing”). Since Watson won Jeopardy!, not only did it become more popular for defeating two humans, but Watson became well known for its natural language processing. Bruce Upbin wrote in an article for Forbes