Comment by UnquietTinkerer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UnquietTinkerer | Hacker News Reader

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UnquietTinkerer

I think the 60 Minutes segment was just marketing copy handed to them by IBM (how else could they talk for 20 minutes about cutting-edge ML without mentioning Google or Amazon at all?). Watson is introduced as "an AI" - singular - designed to play Jeopardy and then, after he wins, nobly re-purposed to medicine. Charlie Rose even says at one point that "they taught Watson to diagnose cancer", implying that it was the same Watson who won Jeopardy. The truth is the original Watson is on display in a glass case somewhere and the new "Watson" shares only the name and some of the underlying ML techniques.

It might be easy to understand what Charlie really meant when you are already familiar with the project, but the non-technical viewer will walk away thinking of Watson as a single, coherent entity sitting in an IBM vault somewhere. Conflating ML-based expert systems with anthropomorphic AI is farcical, supporting the accusations that IBM is overselling its product. It is also irresponsible, because it fuels the idea in the popular mind that machine learning is creating independent intelligences rather than mere tools.

Google and Amazon were presumably left out because the segment was in the context of the healthcare field. I don't think DeepMind's healthcare initiatives were very mature at that point.

I agree the language is problematic for non-technical viewers, but at the same time these are difficult concepts to explain to non-technical people, and explain the details of what it can't do is obviously much less compelling than focusing on what it can do.

> these are difficult concepts to explain to non-technical people

But that's not the problem, is it? It's not that IBM is trying to explain something difficult. Rather, if IBM was trying to be honest, the box that won Jeopardy would be called Watson, and the box they're now trying to sell everyone and their dog would be called "Whitney, Watson's big sister" or whatever. At the very least, "Watson the third".

By calling it the exact same name, you are trying to convince us it's the exact same thing just with more training. Which it's not.

Others mentioned poisoning the well; round here the expression is "pissing in the well", which I think fits much better.

I mean, plenty of software gets rewritten and sold under the same name as an old version - I'm not really sure I see the difference there.

IIRC the segment was followed by a self-driving car piece at Carnegie Mellon. If thats true then it was a clearly a general A.I. / M.L. piece. I've seen this episode twice and its also possible that a month ago it was re-aired alongside other content.

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