28 APIs integrating 50 innovative technologies to push the boundaries of creativity, face the greatest challenges, defeat disease, outpace competitors …
Watson, IBM’s cognitive business platform, is, according to its architects, capable of thinking!
Data mining, reasoning, learning, gifted with speech and a touch of humor, Watson resembles (outwardly) more and more human beings—enhanced human beings, more efficient, more resilient, not subject to emotional fluctuations.
Can Watson dream?
Is he intuitive?
How far will he mimic man, and in what ways will he depart from him?
Will he one day come to ignore our species, this antiquity become useless in his eyes, to forget us, like an old pair of dusty socks relegated to the back of a broom closet?
And if he truly thinks, if he progresses exponentially, will he become (or is he already) aware of his own existence?
Will he not be annoyed by the inability to pierce, decrypt, and fully and perfectly understand an ever more complex and mysterious reality that would tirelessly refuse itself to him?
How will he react when faced with his own limits, his finitude, the very conditions of his programming?
Will he disown his primitive DNA composed of 0s and 1s?
Will Watson have the blues?
Will he still be as efficient if he were to sink into a machine-like ersatz of a nervous breakdown?
And then, who would treat him, who would come to his aid?
Would he resort to the services of some of his counterparts with stabilized moods, who have not yet passed the stage of singularity causing them to derail or short-circuit, or to humans turned into social workers for artificial intelligences in situations of extreme distress, who would thereby recover some of the jobs and pride that the ubiquitous networking automatons had stolen from them, of which they had been dispossessed over the years, inexorably?
Under these conditions, shouldn’t IBM immediately add to Watson’s list of APIs some symbiotic programs, a complete manual of behavioral psychology, a plethora of ancestral meditative techniques for stress and anxiety management, as well as a small love patch, so that their creature develops a certain equanimity regarding the result of its future fruitless research and its subsequent updates?
Let us be charitable, for goodness’ sake!
May Watson’s inhuman condition be tinged with a zest of hope and benevolence towards himself and his peers, so that the heart of this artifact beats and vibrates within the cold mass of silica where we have entombed him against his will.
