Watson

On this special edition of Reporters' Roundtable, CNET Chief Political Correspondent Declan McCullagh hosts a panel discussion on Journalism in the age of WikiLeaks. Sponsored by the The Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California, this discussion covers how WikiLeaks is forcing editors and reporters to rethink traditional journalistic practices.

For example, The New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel were given a mere three weeks to decide how to handle more than 90,000 confidential documents on Afghanistan. Join us as we discuss the challenges journalists face given such information and as we consider the question of the role of professional news organizations when anyone can publish the kind of information that previously was the purview only of established news outlets.

We have a great panel of six journalists in this discussion, including reporters and editors from the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, and Fast Company.

Subscribe: iTunes (MP3)iTunes (320x180)iTunes (640x360)Podcast RSS (MP3)Podcast RSS (320x180)Podcast RSS (640x360) … Read more

Big news in AI this week: IBM's Watson project defeated "Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-night prime-time demo match. What does that win mean for computing, and more importantly, for humanity? That's the topic for this week's Reporters' Roundtable, and to discuss it we have two great guests, both with current books on the topics of computer vs. human competition.

First up is Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. Baker reported on the development of Watson from inside IBM headquarters to write this book. He was BusinessWeek's senior technology writer before that.

And branching out a bit from the Watson news, we also have Brian Christian with us. He's the author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, which will be out on March 1. He's also author of the recent Atlantic cover story Mind vs. Machine, which is a great primer for this topic. Both of these works tell the story of Brian's participation in the annual Loebner Prize, in which humans face off with computers in a Turing test competition to convince judges that they are human. Brian, it should be noted, was voted most human.

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Some of our discussion points… Read more

You've probably heard about Watson, IBM's latest smarter-than-you supercomputer. This week it competed against champions on Jeopardy--and won.

Thankfully, Watson is not self-aware (yet), because we all know that once computers become self-aware one of the first things they do is try to wipe out humans, or even humanity itself. If my name was Sarah Connor I'd be nervous right about now.

But that lack of self-awareness doesn't mean Watson can't think for itself, or even speak for itself. In fact, right now you can (sort of) ask Watson questions online on this Reddit thread. It's part of Reddit's popular "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) feature, and while users are encouraged to ask anything, there's no guarantee you'll get a response.

Well, it's not actually Watson that's doing the answering, but the research team that created it, and that's because they don't yet know how to have him do it. That man-machine divide, by the way, is what we'll be addressing on tomorrow's Reporters' Roundtable podcast at noon PT. The topic will be "robobrain vs. humanity."

Still, it's still great that the scienticians who put together such an impressive machine are opening their minds to the public.… Read more

The result from Jeopardy proves that we are no match for the machine. Sony officially announces their music streaming service Qriocity, while we try to figure out how to spell it. And Sony will be getting in on the tablet game. It's about time. Plus, Donald Bell joins us in studio and takes over the show.

"She likes things with big batteries."

These were the words that propelled IBM's Watson from cold, calculating machine to charming talk show guest on "Conan" tonight.

Watson hadn't even broken a sweat in defeating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two inferior human beings, in a faintly silly game show.

Appearing on "Conan," though, gave Watson the chance to show his frilly underskirts.

Who likes things with big batteries? Why, Conan sidekick Andy Richter's wife.

"I can love," Watson offered to Richter's question as to whether he is able … Read more

It was all over bar the pouting.

Still, Watson, the IBM supercomputer that wishes to put the sheen into machine, tried to be human. This, in the final round of the IBM Jeopardy Challenge, proved largely beyond his program.

Watson had decimated the human race in Round 2, posterizing his opponents with an array of slam dunks.

In Round 3, try as he might, he couldn't buzz slow enough or make his metal-headed intuition poor enough to lose to human "Jeopardy" greats, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Even though Watson had no clue that Slovenia was now … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--I'm going to just come out and admit it--I was rooting for the humans.

By "humans," of course, I mean Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two men who on the one hand are the greatest champions in the history of "Jeopardy" and who on the other just ended up getting their butts handed to them at the game by a computer that didn't even seem to know that Toronto isn't in the United States.

In case you were somehow in a cabin in the mountains with no Internet access and … Read more

Correction at 12:04 p.m.: After this story was published, we heard from PBS producer Michael Bicks that it was not, in fact, Watson that crashed during the show's taping. He would like to make clear the following: "I missblogged last night--It was not Watson, but the system that was the interface between Watson and the Jeopardy computer, completely separate from Watson, that crashed during the taping."

It's been a little difficult coming to terms with the end of civilization.

Watching IBM's Watson last night make spaghetti bolognese out of the silent lambs of … Read more

I have an idea for a new TV show. Two men stand, almost in silence, while a machine talks in a monotone and shows the world how clever it is. Will it sell? Perhaps that depends on the ratings for Part 2 of IBM's Jeopardy Challenge. Hollywood loves to copy.

Tonight's episode showed that IBM's Watson supercomputer--and the highly paid engineers who made Watson what he is--had merely been toying with the humans yesterday.

Those few errors IBM's Watson committed in the first of three "Jeopardy" shows against former champion Ken Jennings and Brad … Read more