Watson, What's next? - Ultimate knowledge economy.

IBM has built a new super computer program called Watson and it is capable of playing Jeopardy quiz game against humans and winning them hands down. This amazing super computer is a result of deepQA project which "understands" human natural language and answers the question from its knowledge built again by processing millions of articles written in natural language. So, this is how the Watson plays the game. Just like other human contestants, it listens to the "answer" on select topic, digitizes the voice, process and understand the hint. Searches its knowledge base, comes up with correct "question" before others and presses the button. Then when asked, Watson would 'speak out' the question in natural language. If the "question" was correct contestants get points else they get to loose points.

In other words, computer program can read and understand any printed book, news paper archive and correlate events hence build its 'knowledge'. Here is an interesting video by lead scientist David Ferrucci of deepQA project. What interested me at first is that Watson is improving its answering accuracy since three years and now it can beat any grandmasters of Jeopardy game. Another piece of detail is Watson is built by networking what seems to be server-grade computers. It runs 3000 Cores simultaneously. It is NOT a keyword matching search engine.

Ok, now let me speculate little bit here what might happen next:

1) Immediate: Dawn of cog-engine
IBM might roll out its next version of "search engine" whose results are far better than Google's. They might probably call it "Cog Engine" than search engine. Who knows, Google might already be working on something similar already. It is not IBM or google, point here is "search" as we know it today might change dramatically.


2)Immediate to near future: Worthless "Research"
"Research" would loose its meaning. Anyone who has access to Watson type programs could produce the results in a day or two what today's researcher would produce with years of effort. So, it is imperative that either human researcher find something really complex to research on OR they research on improving watson algo itself!


3) Immediate to near future: Hand-held Watson
You would be able to conduct the research/learning/QA from your mobile devices. Mobile phones would be so powerful that they could easily do the "knowledge retrival" part. "Knowledge gathering" part may be done by relatively powerful servers on the cloud.

4) Far future: Download F-16 flying skill
Some one will eventually figure out how human brain analyses the natural language and makes decision vis-a-vis Watson. Watson is made to mimic the brain in the first place any way. Once that is done, the "knowledge" can be freely moved across machines and humans. Think about it, computers can learn a subject and move the "knowledge" to humans' brains and vice versa.

5) Digitize the skill:
Logical next step would be to digitize the "skill set". Till today, humans acquire knowledge individually. That means, One has to learn a subject by reading books, practising the art etc basically by putting in time and effort. He or she eventually becomes expert in the subject. Then He/She dies. Only way to pass on the expertise or knowledge to other people is by writing a book or articles or by giving speech and so on. So, there is no "continuity" in the knowledge gaining process. Now, if one can digitize and pass on the "expertise" to others as he/she left it without needing to write a book and others to read and work on it to get to that point.
Imagine you could download Linus Torvalds' operating system knowledge and Larry Page/Sergey Brin's analytical knowledge and Steve Job's product finish and marketing right into your brain!
No one would ever need to write a book, article, papers, exams and so on. you could directly submit your brain map for evaluation when you graduate out of college! Implications are profound.

6) Cog-market: sell your skill for the stay at ski resort
Imagine you have knowledge market, where various skill sets in various maturity level gets traded like stocks in today's stock/commodity market. one could learn any language in a jiffy. There could be some rating agency that grades the quality people's knowledge. So, people will be become Hardware that constantly work and improve the humanity's software - knowledge system that is.

7) Far into future: The Big Leap
We humans, have taken 10,000 years since we organized ourselves as civilization to develop steam engine (invention in mid of 18th century)and hence industrial revolution. It just took us less than 50years since we got our practical computer to get to where we are now. Previously, it would take decades to conceptualizing a product , developing a product to seeing the product in market. Now-a-days, it is the matter of years some time within a year.
Rightly, we are already on exponential growth trajectory in improving our collective cognizance. This is primarily because we are building stuff on the knowledge we have gained so far. The predictions which I have dared to make, if comes true... if at all, then the exponential growth is not just going to grow faster. It is going to be a complete game changer. our growth path would be hyper-exponential or hyper-hyperbolic.

The exponential growth seems very impressive given where we started from. But in absolute terms, humanity is still sub Type-1 Kardashev scale. We are at 0.7 in kardashev scale while aliens/extra terrestrials are expected to be of Type-II or even Type-III civilizations. Ultimately this hyper-hyperbolic growth would help propel our civilization from the Type-I into Type-II.

I would think it would all or most of it happen in next 3, 4 or 5 decades of time. We are going to live in interesting times. The Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times" is more truer for this generation than anybody else.