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IBM's Watson: A Watershed Event For Information Technology--And For Society: Page 4 of 5

There are other possible areas where Watson's ease of use could be valuable. Making Watson available via a cell phone would allow people to ask a natural language question and get back a very precise answer verbally (rather than having to try to review information on a small screen in text). Hint to IBM: This would be great for the blind, who could use it as a general-purpose application. Another option is the possibility of a micro-Watson on a desktop. A GUI provides a richer set of choices than command line, but can you really find the functionality that you need when you need it? Help features are notoriously unhelpful. Watson could be a godsend for these and other sticky areas.

Still why is Watson so important? What use is it? As Benjamin Franklin once said, "What is the use of a newborn baby?" If you did not know that Watson was a computer, could you tell it apart from the other contestants? The answer is no, and so Watson passes a very important intelligence test that some would not have thought could be passed for many more years, if ever. That alone qualifies it as a milestone in computer intelligence.

I will have to admit mixed emotions about whether I wanted one of the humans, Brad Rutter or Ken Jennings, or Watson to win the "Jeopardy" matches. I respect human intelligence, but, as a long-time member of the IT community in one way or other, I love to see advances in technology that benefit society. Never forget that Watson is still based in human creativity. However, the question is moot. IBM's Watson has demonstrated that it has solved the natural language problem from a question and answer perspective at a world-class level. Watson's dominant win is a milestone that will be remembered in information technology history.

It is rare to have a technology that once appeared only in science fiction come true. The cell phone is an instantiation of the famous Dick Tracy wrist radio. Watson is an instantiation of the Q&A computer on the original Star Trek television series. Though the derivative benefits of Watson are some time away from being realized, even though those benefits are subtler than something we can touch (a physical product) or see (an application on the Internet), they are going to be real. Hey, it may be your life that Dr. Watson helps to save. From a societal perspective, it could be argued that IBM has the obligation to see that such a unique and potentially beneficial technology is used as broadly as possible, even if this means licensing or making it open.

I feel impelled to give out some thank yous. We constantly hear about the need for innovation as essential to our society. With the diminishing resources for basic research (witness Bell Labs), the seeds for technological progress are hard to find. Fortunately, some large IT vendors continue to invest in and perform very good and valuable research that goes beyond the next revision of a current product. IBM is one of those companies.