Will IBM's Watson Kill Your Career? 206
Nerval's Lobster writes "IBM's Watson made major headlines last year when it trounced its human rivals on Jeopardy. But Watson isn't just sitting around spinning trivia questions to stump the champs: IBM is working hard on taking it into a series of vertical markets such as healthcare, contact management and financial services to see if the system can be used for diagnosing diseases and catching market trends. Does this spell the end for certain careers? Not really, but it does raise some interesting thoughts and issues."
Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The real question is what do we do when it makes 90% of jobs unneeded?
I would love to think star trek, but dystopia is far more likely than utopia.
No. (Score:0, Insightful)
Next question.
Betteridge's law of headlines wins again (Score:5, Insightful)
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines [wikipedia.org]
Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
People can never be made obsolete. Only jobs can be made obsolete.
And again, like I say in every one of these topics, if the benefits of increased efficiency do not accrue to the entire economy, that's a problem with the economic system, not the increased efficiency. Ideally, increased efficiency should abolish the need for some work allowing us to spend more of our time doing things we want. The fact that it actually ends up enriching the rich and leaving the working classes (and now the thinking classes) destitute is a fundamental problem with capitalism.
Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Computers in Healthcare = certain death (Score:4, Insightful)
If your algorithm considers "death" to be an optimal solution, you haven't defined the problem correctly.
Instead of framing it as "no suffering", you would define the desired outcome in terms of patient contentment, activity levels, ability to care for themselves, or whatever other metrics medical researchers (I am not one) use to analyze how well a healthcare system is working. Of course I would also want an empathetic human being capable of understanding the ethical and moral implications of the situation to make the actual recommendations to the patient, but diagnostic software is no different from any other kind of software: it does what the programmer tells it to do.
Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a fundamental problem with capitalism; it's a (very slowly) emerging consequence. Capitalism does not NEED to have this problem, as long as all participants are self-determining, self-interested, rational actors. It's just that all 3 of those points are, at best, approximately true or true for most participants. The introduction of AI into the equation just adds actors who aren't self-determining(the goals of their decisions are predefined) or self-interested(they are programmed/trained to be interested in their owner's success). That will eventually collapse the system, if prevalent enough.
For the moment, though, there are enough tasks that humans are better at than computers that this does not need to be a concern. 50 years from now, being in a true capitalist economy will make your life hell.
Re:Watson is a better button pusher (Score:5, Insightful)
So your argument seems to be that Watson was almost as good at finding the correct answer (otherwise his fast reaction time would not have helped him), but won only because he was faster. But in most jobs, being a fraction of a second faster/slower is not particularly important. Furthermore, being almost-as-good, but doing so 100% of the time 24/7/365, and requiring only electricity and routine maintenance... would be rather attractive to a lot of employers.
Watson had an unfair advantage on Jeopardy (Score:4, Insightful)
On the Jeopardy challenge, the text of the clues was given to Watson at the moment the clue was revealed. This communication, using any modern network technology, would take milliseconds at most, but would still be perceived as effectively simultaneous to when the clue is uncovered. However, this gives an easily measurable advantage to Watson, who can being parsing the meaning of the sentence several moments before the human contestants have even finished knowing what the clue actually says... since a great deal of the challenge of Jeopardy is in the timing of when to buzz in, humans would have less time than Watson to prepare to buzz in (on the order of tenths of a second, more than likely, but more than enough to make a difference, IMO).
Far be it for me to come across as diminishing what the developers of Watson did... it's extremely impressive, but I'd have to wonder if it would have done as well if the text of the clue had been fed to it a little more slowly... say, at a fixed speed of 14.4kbps, which corresponds roughly with what a very fast reader could absorb text at. This would have demonstrated, IMO, whether a computer could really solve the problem faster than a human could, or if it could actually solve a problem faster than human reaction time to visual/audible input (which in humans, I believe, is going to be the slower of the two processes).
Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
if the benefits of increased efficiency do not accrue to the entire economy, that's a problem with the economic system, not the increased efficiency. Ideally, increased efficiency should abolish the need for some work allowing us to spend more of our time doing things we want. The fact that it actually ends up enriching the rich and leaving the working classes (and now the thinking classes) destitute is a fundamental problem with capitalism.
The fundamental problem is that increased efficiency is likely to result in a situation where you have a surplus of labor and a shortage of talent. The people who end up replaced by machines will be the people who are easily replaced by machines because their job isn't that hard- it doesn't require much training, experience, or ability. You might be able to throw together a voice recognition system, a crude AI, and a robotic arm and replace the teenager working at the McDonald's drive-thru window. But you can't replace someone like a Steve Jobs, a Mark Zuckerberg, or a Sergei Brin with a computer, you can't even easily replace them with another person, because they are exceptionally good at doing an exceptionally hard job. That's why CEOs are paid millions of dollars to run major corporations- because when the difference between the right person and the almost-right person is billions of dollars in profit, paying a CEO tens of millions of dollars is a sound investment in the success of the company. Their talent is worth that much. The difference between Steve Jobs and pretty much anyone else on the planet was Apple failing, versus Apple turning into the largest company in the world, and that's worth a lot of money.
So when those drive-through employees end up unemployed, it doesn't mean that the CEO gets to do less work. It's not like drive-through guy could be hired to come in and run Facebook for a few hours a day so that Zuckerberg can go and have some downtime. The result is that instead of everybody working less, we may end up with more people poor and unemployed, and a few people overworked and rich. We may already be seeing this happening, as pay for a handful of elite performers- the CEOs, hedge fund managers, rock stars, professional athletes, blockbuster novelists, movie producers, etc. has gone up, while overall wages have stagnated or gone down.
Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget raccoons. Are fearfully smart and have that opposable thumb thing going on.
Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism does not NEED to have this problem, as long as all participants are self-determining, self-interested, rational actors.
Assuming all those things, how would capitalism solve this problem? If you only need the labor of 1/10th of 1 percent of the population to support the entire population, how does the other 99.9% earn their keep?
The only answer is by encouraging people to buy things they don't need. But that just means people need to work more to buy things they don't need. Which destroys the whole point of increasing efficiency in the first place.
Re:This Can't Be Happening!!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
A good point about opportunity, except that the number of people who build and maintain those systems will be far in deficit from the total number of workers displaced by their very existence. Ideally, you would maintain the same workforce and use those computer systems as a force multiplier for all, but the emphasis these days is "do more with less" rather than "do a whole lot more with the same".
Re:"Career" (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to capitalism. Why are we still stuck here?