Perhaps Watson's no Hal. He's not going to be a maniacal genius bent on destroying humanity as we know it.
But IBM's already gearing up, after the robo-contestant's Jeopardy! performance, for Watson's cousins to replace physicians assistants -- or even, egads, lawyers.
Karl Marx once said something about technology, growth, and working people. Competition among industry participants leads to greater investment in captial to achieve efficiency gains and lower costs of production. Generally, these efficiency gains means they need to hire less workers. At least of the kind that demand decent wages.
Where do the workers go? Marxist opponents would say: to the machines that make the stuff that leads to efficiency gains.
But then you run into the same problem.
It only works if the economy is dynamic enough to keep shifting to new ideas, new industries. Yet, babies are born every day, babies that venture companies will hire before hiring a middle aged worker with higher minimum salary requirements and a more limited useful working life. And the failed industrialists -- the ones who couldn't keep up -- continue to join the ranks.
And it's not exactly if our society is set up to feed them whilst they leisurely bide away their time at home, jobless.
Guess the PAs and JDs (who haven't already lost jobs to doc review corals in India) are going to start to feel like it's like to be a line worker. Or how it feels like to have an outsourced IT job.
The answer here, of course, is not to disdain technology. Especially the kind that can improve peoples' health. The answer is to distribute the savings and gains in such a way so that people don't starve to death. Not just to the clawing hands of the very few.
Otherwise, we'll have to start calling Watson "Hal."
