I know that we are at a point where stunning technological innovations are weekly news, that we can brush aside and ignore news about a 3D printer of 3D objects.
But Watson?
IBM Watson is a sign that we have just crossed over the other side.
And which “side” would that be? I’m not sure I understand.
The one thing about 3d printers are that they have been around for, in the tech world, a while- I know several years ago one of the capstone projects at my university was making a small (standard laserprinter sized) 3d printer, which has disappeared, atleast from my knowledge.
Please - Watson Schmatson.
… And I suppose you’ve competed on Jeopardy and beat both the longest reigning and winningest (in terms of cash and prizes) contestants ever and won by a LANDSLIDE!? 
I thought it was really rather impressive.
Who cares. The computer can think faster than a person anyways. Let me know when a computer feels like it’s a human being.
We got one at work. Meh. Not that amazing. To be honest, it’s pretty useless and expensive.
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Kind of impressive. But it’s kind of dumb to try to make computers out-human humans. Artificial intelligence is here, and it’s in a form that most of us don’t recognize. It does things that humans aren’t able to do.
Actually, I care. I think it’s really interesting to understand how “machine learning” works and to see what it is capable of. I also think it’s interesting to understand how machines like Watson could be used in society, for good or ill. And I certainly hope there is never a machine that “feels” anything, much less human.
I agree, Watson really is an amazing break through.
If nothing else, i think it is a sign that information retrieval systems (like google), that rely primarily on statistical techniques for retrieving relevant documents or web pages, are the on decline. In their place will be question answering systems that don’t just supply you relevant documents but directly answer your questions.
This will fundamentally change the way we interact with our computers, how we process and transmit information, i mean JEE-WHIZ!!! WHO CARES?? HOW CAN ANYONE SAY THAT!?!? The wide spread adoption of question answering technology will, in my humble not really educated opinion, result in the greatest productivity leap since the internet.
Anyways, Watson is just one of many signs of the AI Revolution currently in progress:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_ai_essay_airevolution/
PS* Just to get everyone’s goat. Government did play an important role in the development of QA systems like Watson and IR systems like Google, through the TREC program.
http://trec.nist.gov/
PPS* Who ever said they will only be impressed by a computer that “feels” human doesn’t really understand what AI is about. It’s not about creating electronic men like Data from star trek tng. its about creating machines that in some sense think for themselves, even if they “think” differently than humans.
I believe that both will continue to have their place. The lines between “expert systems” and bayesian networks/statistical methods seems to be getting blurred.
A machine that thinks like a human… not what I would call progress.
That sounds a bit alarmist. 
It’s not that the machine thinks like a human, it’s that the machine is capable of understanding, with greater accuracy than has ever been achieved before, human language. Think of it like a story problem in an elementary math class. I read it and understand that it’s a multiplcation problem. I pull out the relevant information, and I construct a solution. This machine, instead of having to have the math spelled out explicitly “X+1=2, solve for X,” it can guess more accurately what the implied math in the [natural “human”] language of the “story problem” is… if that makes sense.
Well, next thing you know is Watson demanding RIGHTS! OMG!
More like snoozist. I’d worry more about improving human understanding first.
Eh? Watson is just a highly advanced search engine for trivia. There is zero “thinking” involved. The precieved difference is only that you ask your question rather than type it.
There has never been a computer before which has been capabable of thought, and it is going to be much longer before one ever does. Not until we get quantum computers in my opinion.
I am not too threatened by technology that “thinks” Toronto is a U.S. city.
Something to think about. Watson had a 10 millisecond delay imposed on it as a “reaction time” before it could buzz in. What is the average human reaction time? 200+ milliseconds. That to me means that IBM stole that competition. Also, I don’t know how to quantify this, but it seemed to me that a lot of the questions were ones that could be answered through keyword searches. Admittedly, there were a few questions that seemed to have some puns and other language games involved that it was able to answer, but I would’ve like to think more of that.