To Erase or Not?
Watson, the artificial intelligence computer, is old news: but in case you didn’t know, it was developed by IBM and can answer questions posed in natural language (aka human speak). Watson shot to fame back in 2011, when it competed on the US game show, Jeopardy , against 2 former winners and won. That should give you an idea of how good it is. Obviously, Watson has a massive repository of both structured and unstructured content that it refers to. The IBM team then attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary, an online dictionary meant for “slang or ethnic culture words, phrases, and phenomena not found in standard dictionaries.” Soon the researchers discovered that Watson couldn’t distinguish polite language v/s profanity! So they decided to delete the Urban Dictionary from its memory. Nicholas Carr didn’t approve the decision to delete items from memory and wrote the following lines : “I know that God takes a lot of heat for giving us the capacity for sin, but I give...