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Comment by bgurupra | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

Oh, and while we can't synthesize ribosomes yet, we can in fact custom-design DNA and inject it into an existing cell: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium

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.

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