Blog: A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans

A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans
New York Times (02/15/11) John Markoff

In 1963 Stanford University's John McCarthy launched the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) research, while Douglas Engelbart formed the Augmentation Research Center, which is focused on intelligence augmentation (IA). Ever since, the decades-long competition between AI and IA has resulted in new computing technologies that are transforming the world. IBM's Watson supercomputer is the most recent example of how far AI technology has come. Watson is designed to advance the techniques used to process human language. The progression of natural language processing is leading to a new age of automation that could transform areas of the economy that haven't been significantly influenced by technology. IBM executives hope to commercialize Watson for use in question-answering systems designed for business, education, and medicine. In the future, almost any job that involves answering questions or conducting transactions over the phone might be made obsolete by Watson-like systems. Intelligence augmentation technology also is greatly influencing human society, with Google being the most prominent example of how IA uses software to process the collective intelligence of humans and make the information available in a digital library.

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