Weakly Watson: Real Journalists May Be Remaindered
June 25, 2016
That IBM Watson is a versatile confection. I read “IBM’s Watson Tries Its Hand at Editing a Magazine.” Not only does software have a hand, the software is androgynous. In IBM’s quest for revenue and perceived leadership in smart software, the company has targeted journalism as a field of dreams.
The write up reports:
The Drum, a marketing site and publication, apparently allowed Watson to edit the latest issue of its magazine, effectively benching the human editor for an AI (at least in some respects).
I learned:
IBM’s David Kenny commented: “Right now AI is more about people querying machines. My dream is that Watson will ask us questions, giving computers abductive rather than deductive reasoning skills. Abductive reasoning will lead to conversation and dialogue with humans. “And that in turn will lead to more creative thinking, because machine learning means cognitive computing systems will become smarter over time on their own. We’re on that path now, but much work is ahead of us.”
“Abductive” means, I think, moving from an observation via a training set to a theory which accounts for the observation. I recall that Autonomy’s digital reasoning engine used a somewhat similar method in — when was it — about 1996.
Now about those revenues? Would IBM Watson evidence snappier performance if it were running on the world’s fastest supercomputers from China? Just asking. There are those computational issues and, in addition, the need for human ministration of the IBM Watson system.
Stephen E Arnold, June 25, 2015
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