Im Februar 2011 wurde Geschichte geschrieben. Einem IBM-Computer namens Watson gelang, was viele Kritiker für unmöglich gehalten hatten: Er schlug zwei Kandidaten bei einer Fernseh-Quizshow namens Jeopardy («Gefahr»). Millionen amerikanischer Zuschauer saßen gebannt vor dem Bildschirm, als Watson seine Gegner methodisch ausschaltete, Fragen beantwortete, die seine Konkurrenten ratlos machten, und ein Preisgeld von 1 Million Dollar einstrich.

Watson is a supercomputer designed to play the popular game show Jeopardy! in which contestants are asked questions on a wide variety of topics that are not known in advance. In many cases, these questions involve puns and other types of wordplay. It can be difficult to figure out precisely what is being asked, or how an answer should be constructed. Playing Jeopardy! Well, in short, requires the ability to engage in complex communication.

Artificial intelligence took a big leap into the future in 2011 when an IBM computer, Watson—named after IBM’s past chairman—took on Ken Jennings, who held the record of 74 wins on the popular TV show Jeopardy, and defeated him. The showdown, which netted a $1 million prize for IBM, blew away TV viewers as they watched their Jeopardy hero crumble in the presence of the “all-knowing” Watson. Watson is a cognitive system that is able to integrate “natural language processing, machine learning, and hypothesis generation and evaluation,” says its proud IBM parent, allowing it to think and respond to questions and problems.

Millions of people witnessed the IBM computer named Watson play the natural-language game of Jeopardy! and obtain a higher score than the best two human players in the world combined. It should be noted that not only did Watson read and “understand” the subtle language in the Jeopardy! query (which includes such phenomena as puns and metaphors), but it obtained the knowledge it needed to come up with a response from understanding hundreds of millions of pages of natural-language documents including Wikipedia and other encyclopedias on its own. It needed to master virtually every area of human intellectual endeavor, including history, science, literature, the arts, culture, and more.

The fact that in 2011 Watson - IBM’s system capable of answering questions asked in natural language - won against ist human opponents when playing Jeopardy! Only shows that artefacts can be smart without being intelligent. Data miners do not need to be intelligent to be successful.

Watson’s ability to intelligently master the knowledge in natural-language documents is coming to a search engine near you, and soon. People are already talking to their phones in natural language (via Siri, for example, which was also contributed to by Nuance). These natural-language assistants will rapidly become more intelligent as they utilize more of the Watson-like methods and as Watson itself continues to improve.

Die Datenbank von Watson, die aus rund 200 Millionen Seiten von Dokumenten bestand, die vier Terabyte Speicherplatz auf der Festplatte erforderten, schloss eine Komplettkopie von Wikipedia ein. Eine Zeit lang war auch ein Exemplar des Urban Dictionary enthalten, das auch derbe Ausdrucksweisen enthält, doch dieses Archiv für nutzergenerierte Inhalte wurde wieder entfernt, weil Watson zum Entsetzen seiner Schöpfer anfing, Schimpfwörter in seine Antworten einzubauen.

Die Bearbeitung einer Suchanfrage und das Zusammentragen nachgefragter Daten oder Information ist vergleichsweise simpel, doch Antworten à la Jeopardy! geben, für die man kognitives Verhalten im Sinne von »seinen Verstand benutzen, um ein kniffeliges Frageproblem zu lösen« an den Tag legen muss, gestaltet sich erheblich schwieriger. Mit Watson hat IBM einen großen Wurf getan – weg von der Suchmaschine hin zur Antwortmaschine, zu jener Maschine, die einen Anflug von Bewusstsein zeigt.

IBM’s plans for Watson go far beyond serving the specialized needs of the research industry and the back-office tasks of managing Big Data. Watson is being offered up in the marketplace as a personal assistant that companies and even consumers can converse with by typed text or in real-time spoken words. IBM says that this is the first time artificial intelligence is graduating from a simple question-and-answer mode to a conversational mode, allowing for more personal interaction and customized answers to individual queries.

Watson for Oncology wurde weltweit vermarktet, um Therapien für Krebspatienten vorzuschlagen. Von M. D. Anderson, einem der angesehensten Krebszentren in den USA, bis zu den Manipal Hospitals in Indien kauften Krankhäuser die Dienstleistungen von Watson und bezahlten pro Patient zwischen 200 und 1000 Dollar. Doch Watson konnte noch nicht einmal die Leistung eines ordentlichen menschlichen Arztes abliefern, von einem Mondflug gar nicht zu reden. Viele Therapieempfehlungen des Programms erwiesen sich als falsch und einige als lebensgefährlich für die Patienten.

Some observers have argued that Watson does not really “understand” the Jeopardy! queries or the encyclopedias it has read because it is just engaging in “statistical analysis.” A key point I will describe here is that the mathematical techniques that have evolved in the field of artificial intelligence (such as those used in Watson and Siri, the iPhone assistant) are mathematically very similar to the methods that biology evolved in the form of the neocortex. If understanding language and other phenomena through statistical analysis does not count as true understanding, then humans have no understanding either.

What comes out in the end is so fast and accurate that even the best human Jeopardy! players simply can’t keep up. In February of 2011, Watson played in a televised tournament against the two most accomplished human contestants in the show’s history. After two rounds of the game shown over three days, the computer finished with more than three times as much money as its closest flesh-and-blood competitor. One of these competitors, Ken Jennings, acknowledged that digital technologies had taken over the game of Jeopardy! Underneath his written response to the tournament’s last question, he added, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”