From Her to Watson, and What's Next?
9 October 2014
Her is a 2013 American science fiction romantic comedy-drama film written, directed, and produced by Spike Jonze. The film follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a man who develops a relationship with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an intelligent computer operating system personified through a female voice. Jonze conceived the idea in the early 2000s after reading an article about Cleverbot, a web application that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to have conversations with humans. I spent an entire day with Watson last Tuesday along with my colleague Dan Latimore (should read his blog about it! http://bankingblog.celent.com/2014/10/08/spending-a-day-with-ibms-watson/) and I could not avoid the resemblance, though IBM's Watson is much more focused on the business side of the machine/human interaction and collaboration. Watson is a learning system that scales human expertise by extending our abilities to perceive, reason, and relate:
- Perceiving: Watson understands the world as we do; it interprets sensory input beyond traditional data. Understands natural language; reads manuals, social data, blogs, consumer reviews, etc.
- Reasoning: Watson thinks through complex problems; it deepens our analysis and inspires creativity. Makes inferences, evaluates pros and cons, and finds relationships between terms and concepts
- Relating: Watson understands how we communicate, and personalizes its interactions with each of us. Responds in natural language, personalizes the interaction and provides reasons
- Learning: Watson learns from every interaction, scaling our ability to build experience. Trains with experts and improves with feedback.
- Amplify human cognitive strengths
- Enable a deeper level of reasoning
- Make decision trade-offs with higher levels of confidence
- Democratize experience and knowledge within your organization and value chain