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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

If you asked those same experts in 2005 if a Jeopardy computer would beat the best human Jeopardy contestants ever in 2011, what percentage of them would go on the record with the correct answer?

What is expertise today, tomorrow is passé.

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Yes, it would have been hard for them to predict that anybody would decide to tackle that particular task. The question from GP is about a much broader range of tasks.

Watson understands natural language(to some extent).That's a general capability, not a specific task.

Watson was designed to answer Jeopardy questions. If Alex Trebek had used natural language to ask it anything other than a jeopardy question it would have failed spectacularly. ie, "So where are you from?".

It was definitely built for one specific task.

It was tuned for that particular task, but the core tech is much more general - the current main application for which IBM is selling the Watson platform is healthcare, which is "a bit" different from answering Jeopardy questions.

Not really. "A runny nose, a fever, body aches" "What are symptoms of flu the with 75% accuracy?"

That's dumbed down of course. It's probably more like "This much of this enzyme concentration in blood, that thing in urine" "What is a 17% chance of developing some condition in the next 5 years?"

Right up until it happened, most people didn't think of "Win Jeopardy" as a particular task at all. It was seen as a "broad range of tasks".

Correct, but that's just because of the inherently unpredictable nature of future telling.

What are the alternatives? One could simply not engage in projections, which is difficult because they're so tempting. A third option is to listen to the non-experts, which doesn't seem more valuable...

This is something I struggle WRT economics. I know economists are little more than fortune tellers, but what are the other options?

In 2011, the New York Times published an interactive "wisdom of crowds" survey of future technologies:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/06/science/201112...

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