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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (254797)	7/2/2014 11:56:43 AM
From: Steve Lokness	Respond to of 542035

"Not just storing data, but finding meaning to it" I'm going to try one more time to explain my thoughts on this. I agree with the above statement 100%. There are several biotech companies now all with their own designed computing system that is meant to tease out of the knowledge base some gem that they can then turn into a new product to manufacture. Think of it as looking for the cure to cancer. But these computers - including your example here of Watson - are just amazing computers, not robots. There are BTW some robots in biotech labs that are performing wonderful things, but your example is not one of them. An example of a robot in a biotech lab would be a machine that automatically goes through hundreds of thousands of chemicals to perform a specific test - so an automatic arm reaches each sample draws it out and does the test, puts it back and then reaches for the next sample and so on. Cool, helpful and replaces a repetitive job YES. But the sophistication of the robot, it's design, the building of it, the manufacture of it, the maintenance of it, the disassemble of it, the design of the next generation and the building of the next generation of it, and the installation of the next generation of it and so on and so on - is all done by man! What the robot does in this situation is make the work go more efficient and faster so the man looking for that cure for cancer is able to move swifter and more efficiently. Now can computers - not robots - analyze a bank of stored facts to determine the best suggested outcome? Sure! I don't disagree with that even in the tiniest. BUT Sam, there are elements that computers and/or robots will not do. You're not going to walk into a dr office and have a computer work you over. You're not going to go to the emergency room with pieces of bone fragments all through your muscles and blood shooting squirting out of an artery and be put back together by a robot.