I have absolutely no expertise in this but I have a feeling that for machines to better us , they need to be engineered at least better than the human brain.And considering Watson is bleeding edge computer and needs a computer as big as a room and lots of power whereas the Human brain fits in a shoe box and can run on a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich - there is a quite a bit of ground to cover before we hit singularity!
How much power does it take to create a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich? To be sure, this Watson is unwieldy, but the gap might be closer than you think.
Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect it's not possible, at least not with consistent results. It looks like Watson is only 5-10 years old, depending on your reckoning.
Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I have no background in these topics but just sounds to me that we are a little off when we talk about creating Singularity in the near future!
The thing with nature is that it's "design process" if one can call it that is really dumb. It tries random stuff and then basically hill-climbs. Significant redesigns are very improbable as a result. There's no direction to the optimization search.
I would certainly hope that we can do better than nature in this regard.
plus the way I understood , Watson has tons of algorithms of finding the answer and it runs all of those on the input in massively parallel system with processing speed much higher than the human brain , if Ken Jennings is using a much much smaller and slower device and still is almost par I think the engineering of watson is almost trivial compared to the Brain considering Ken's brains also tracking other 20 million parameters of his body and regulating all of that at the same time
Comparing the processing ability of the human brain with that of Watson is not meaningful. A computer also regulates a ton of parameters like CPU temperature, voltage, and so on. And every single unit has its own logic circuits for regulating internal stability.
What's meaningful is comparing energy and time required for creating a human or a computer capable of doing this, as well as maintenance costs.
And assuming Moore's law continues unabated, a Watson-scale machine will be competitive with a human within five to ten years. Given that it's already functional, I would bet money that it will be cost-effective compared to Ken Jennings by 2045, whether through advances in computing or energy. I wouldn't bet it will be sentient, but just that we can build one and set it up to answer questions cheaper than we can raise someone with as good a head for trivia as Ken.
