Artificial Intelligence

Hello from New York. I've been visiting IBM's Watson research lab for a couple of days this week. I got to meet a bunch of very interesting people working here on the next-generation of supercomputers. This is also the birthplace of Watson, the machine, that a while back won a Jeopardy game on TV.
I started thinking about that as I was listening to the rental car navigation system giving me instructions on how to get here. Some of the ones I've used in the past would scold you if you veered off course and tell you that you had made a mistake and that it now had to recalculate the route; just because of you. This one was a little bit more polite, it would simply recalculate a new route and start giving you directions on how to get back on track.
Driving along, taking instructions, and dutifully execution them, I felt a little bit silly. I was driving this computer to wherever she was telling me to go. If all I'm doing is what she tells me, then why isn't she driving the car, and I can sit in the back and read a book or enjoy the view. I'm sure we are not that far away from that being as common as navigation systems are now.
Artificial intelligence always fascinated me. At the same time I was also always skeptical at how far it actually might go. I still think that we wont have a robot in my life time that is smart enough to tie its shoe laces, but these things have come along further than what I would have thought possible ten years ago.
Watson for example impresses me with its speech recognition capability. Being able to ask Jeopardy questions is important too, but in the end it is just a matter of storage and a search algorithm. More a matter of brute force than intelligence. Listening or reading words and sentences, and making "sense" out of them seems to me much more difficult.
Language is such an ambiguous thing were a lot of context is needed to understand the meaning of a given phrase. In grad school I took an AI class and studied natural language disambiguation a little bit. It's amazing how much knowledge and common sense is required to understand even quite simple sentences.
Of course, no computer actually understands anything, so methods to make good guesses are needed to prompt the correct action from a string of words. An interesting area of study, maybe a little bit scary, and definitely annoying when these machines tell you what to do, and you actually do it and follow their orders because you don't want to get lost in traffic.