Nice team of engineers

With or without a nice team of engineers, if a Watson class system can as a matter of fact help a business, it might not be all that expensive. If it can help a business regularly and ends up with a full time job, the server capacity might cost no more than, say, one of the Bloomberg Falcons in the media company's fleet of jetlets.

Okay, the cost of a Watson, or meanwhile the computing power of a Watson, is within the reach of many organizations; it's not just something special only IBM or another hundred-billion-a-year outfit can afford. However that all in all doesn't as a matter of fact explain why IBM didn't build its showcase on its commercial i software or its Unix variant. Big Blue's choice of Linux is a powerful signal to any other company that wants to emulate the Watson concept of artificial intelligence that a Watson class system is within reach, technically and financially, and it can be built on just about any kind of equipment. Like as not some other company will build a Watson and ask it why IBM was happy to show off using Linux to put it more exactly than i, AIX or z/OS. Perhaps IBM should get Watson to critique its at once dog and pony show previously the crowd is in the tent.

What Weizenbaum

I wonder what Weizenbaum would have said about Watson and Jeopardy. Unlike Eliza, Watson's quiz game program didn't seem likely to inveigle trusting innocents into revealing their deepest feelings. It did, but, remind people just how entertaining chatterbots can be. Coupled with the kinds of apps that are popular on smartphones, chatterbots may change the way people interact with machines. If the children of Eliza catch on there will probably be some funny examples of people who are fooled by these things, and some tragic examples, too. It is the nature of the human condition to have more questions than answers, lots more.