At the start of January, an insurance firm in Japan replaced more than 30 employees with an artificial intelligence system. Based on IBM Watson Explorer, the cognitive technology that processes and can understand reams of data, the system was introduced to increase productivity by 30 per cent, and will give the firm a return on its investment in less than two years.
While it seems brutal to make 34 employees redundant to make way for artificial intelligence, this could become commonplace in certain industries over the coming years. And as IBM Watson's supercomputer gets smarter, soon it won’t be the robots thinking like humans, but the humans learning to think like robots.
Aside from its threat to jobs, Watson has made some incredible breakthroughs in terms of science, technology and culture, proving that AI and its capabilities are here to stay.
A special version of IBM Watson was recently released designed specifically to prevent cyberattacks. Unveiled in May last year, the cloud-based cybercrime-fighting software has been trained on what the company calls the "language of security" for almost a year and can now analyse research into potential threats to spot malicious or suspect activity within a firm's computer system.
The company told The Telegraph that IBM Watson "can help thwart the major hacks that have become a growing concern", quoting attacks on Yahoo, Lloyds and TalkTalk. Watson's security machine can additionally save up to 20,000 hours a year chasing false alarms.
"It combines the unique abilities of man and machine intelligence will be critical to the next stage in the fight against advanced cybercrime," said Dennis Kennelly, vice president of technology at IBM Watson.
The AI has been trained to create bespoke recipes for any taste. Simply provide the algorithm information about your ingredients and style of cooking and it will give you some ideas. WIRED asked Watson for a “Chinese-style” dish with Parmesan cheese and dark chocolate and this is what it came up with.
A few years ago, it was estimated it would take 160 hours of reading per week just to keep up with new medical knowledge as it is published – not including time to consider the applications or even relevance of that research.
A supercomputer like IBM Watson can consume all that data and give doctors the relevant information to a particular case, giving them access to better diagnostic information. This has been used at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York since 2013, to help the oncologists support cancer patients.
It was announced in January 2017 that IBM Watson Genomics would be integrated into biotech company Illumina’s TruSight Tumor 170 tool, in order to speed up tailored drug recommendations for cancer patients. Illumina’s tool carries out genetic sequencing across 170 genes, to look for alterations related to a tumour. According to IBM, Watson for Genomics will be able to scan that data and, in a few minutes, create a report based on those alterations, as well as clinical trials and medical literature, to recommend drugs. IBM says the process would ordinarily take a week for human doctors.
IBM worked with researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona and Watson helped discover five new genes linked to ALS (motor neurone disease) in the process.
IBM Watson ingested all the published literature related to the disease and learned all the proteins already known to be linked to the condition. It then ranked all the genes in the human genome, which could be associated with ALS, and discovered five new genes never before associated with the disease. This will give researchers information necessary for developing new drugs to treat it.
Pepper the Robot was upgraded to include IBM Watson’s computer power, making the robot smarter than ever. Designed to interact with humans, Pepper understands human emotions through facial expressions, body language and words, and adapts to them. It’s currently used in business environments, such as a retail assistant in stores, though one day the little robot may be useful in the home.
NAO, a different robot with IBM Watson intelligence, took part in a Q&A at Oxford’s Student Union about the supercomputer and AI.
The co-working platform Slack is about to get a whole lot smarter with the incorporation of IBM Watson. The messaging app has made bots a part of everyday life and these will be getting the Watson treatment specifically to give them an AI-powered update. This should help the Slackbots get better at assisting users on a daily basis and improve the bots built by Slack’s growing pool of outside developers.
In true AI-inception, IBM Watson created the first AI-made film trailer, about an AI horror film. Researchers fed Watson more than 100 horror film trailers, cut into scenes, which the supercomputer analysed to get an idea of how to create the dynamics of the trailer. It then processed 20th Century Fox’s new film Morgan, about a humanoid with superhuman qualities, to find the right moments to include in the trailer. This shortened the process of creating a trailer from around 10 to 30 days to only 24 hours.
How could we forget when IBM Watson hit the headlines by winning the US quiz show Jeopardy? This was one of the first times the AI really came into the public consciousness as the computer beat Ken Jennings, the 74-time winner of the trivia quiz and Brad Rutter, a 20-time champion, in a head-to-head competition on the TV show. Jokes about our robot overlords and references to Terminator were made but since this moment, IBM Watson has gone on to have a huge impact and it will be interesting to see where the supercomputer takes us next.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
