Q&A With the Brains Behind Watson
Guruduth Banavar, the IBM exec leading the team behind Watson, is moving away from the goal of artificial intelligence that mimics human thought in favor of “cognitive systems” that help people make sense of the piles of data that we’re unable to process.
The whole history of artificial intelligence was around building machines that mimic humans. Every aspect of humanity, whether doing simple analytical problems or very complex natural language kinds of dialogue, or some strategic thinking about complex issues that have to do with large geopolitical kinds of environments — all of those things were in the scope of what AI was going to do. And it includes interpersonal relationships and emotion and intuition. But we think of cognitive computing as not competing or mimicking with humans, but rather as complementing people.
