Final Jeopardy: Man vs Machine and the Quest to Know Everything

The Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson prompts questions about the future of knowledge. What can we teach machines? What will Watson’s heirs be capable of in ten or twenty years? And where does that leave humans? Though Watson is deaf and blind, can’t recognize jokes and ‘thinks’ Toronto is a US city. People shouldn’t have a false sense of security. The IBM machine is following a spectacular learning curve. Within a year or two, machines like Watson will be much smarter, faster, more clever with words, and will be crashing into the workplace.

Speaker Details

Stephen Baker was BusinessWeek’s senior technology writer for a decade, based first in Paris and later New York. He is the author of The Numerati, which Roger Lowenstein called “eye-opening and chilling.” He has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal. Baker tweets from @SteveBaker and blogs at finaljeopardy.net.

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Stephen Baker

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