Skynet Is One Step Closer To Kicking Humanity's Ass... At Jeopardy (IBM's Watson vs Humankind's Jeopardy Stars)

Okay, I'm not sure how I should take this. Should I be impressed at the technology? Should I be worried about being replaced by robots? Or should I think it's stupid someone wasted time making this awesome machine play Jeopardy?

Here's one thing I do know, it's not really playing Jeopardy the same way it's opponents are: It's almost certainly being fed plain text answers for it to search for it's questions (not to be confusing, but as you know Jeopardy is in reverse order here). This is because voice recognition is next to impossible. Notice how the website describing DeepQA, the project implemented in Watson in order to participate in Jeopardy, skirts the issue of voice recognition by pretending it doesn't exist, and instead uses clever wording like "natural language". Meaning if you type "How many flames am I gonna get after this here blog post thingy?" it will answer correctly, but if you said it aloud... probably not so much.

In the end, it will be interesting to see if Ken Jennings, and some other dude who would get his ass kicked by Ken anyhow, will triumph over a search engine that can't recognize speech. I'm kidding, I know who Brad Rutter is, but I'm totally on Team Jennings (what team are you on?)

This is sort of cool, and sort of impressive, I guess. But when I really think about it, the most human-like thing Watson is doing here is the computer equivalent of a Stupid Human Trick... a Stupid Computer Trick if you will.

I'm just hoping that after this publicity stunt they move on to something more relevant to computing and enter Watson in an MMA bout with Randy Couture.