That said, I'm unsure how doing something like that would provide the right incentives for the research needed to create the next breakthrough.
2. I too would prefer that more open-source work (and published research) would come out of Watson project than it has been the case so far. However, there's a devil's advocate point to be made that closedness encourages diversity of approaches and implementations. When a high-profile project becomes open-source (as recently happened with TensorFlow), it exerts a lot of pull on time/attention of other developers and researchers that could have been focused on trying out entirely different approaches.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/using-pigeons-to-d...
The Quantum Fund by Soros and others, returned upwards of 30% per year for over three decades.
Steve Cohen averaged near 30% annual returns for two decades.
Buffett's investing track record is similarly off the charts.
And lastly, a monkey couldn't do what John Paulson (or Burry and Eisman) did with the 'greatest trade ever,' producing a radical outcome from an extremely intricate concentrated investment (some of which required them goading the opportunity into existence to begin with).
If you had said monkeys with darts can sometimes outperform the bottom half of traders on Wall Street, you might have been close.
And what is so unlikely about the Watson approach anyway? Have you ever played Akinator? It's not that different.
-- someone in NLP
Having had years of struggle to get a diagnosis on my own problems, the most frustrating part of it all is that exact process, where you are just plugged into the machinery of our health care system, and run through to get a canned answer that needed no human judgment at all, just canned knowledge and a prescribed treatment plan.
So just my own opinion, but yes, please let us automate that portion of medicine, so the doctors can do more research and improve things.
You'd be surprised. Watson is nothing to write home about, it's an umbrella term for various disparate technologies (the chess version is not the same as the Jeopardy version, etc) and most of them are not that impressive in the first place.