IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson (2016)
The way IBM talks about it is completely bs. However, this round of AI is definitely better than the last one. Specifically, whats different this time around is that previously, expert based systems and many machine learning techniques require that you specifically hand code things like:<p>1. Parsing and providing the input dataset into &#x27;features&#x27;<p>2. Hand coding the logic and rules for many different cases (Expert systems)<p>Now, it has become easier to train a model such as a neural net where you can provide much &#x27;rawer&#x27; data; similarly you just provide it a &#x27;goal&#x27; in the form of a loss function which it tries to optimize over the dataset.<p>By &#x27;true&#x27; AI, I think most people mean &#x27;how a human learns&#x27; - which is actually a very biased thing, since we humans have goals of things like the need to survive, etc. I do believe it would be possible to encode these into goals, although doing that properly and more generically seems a little bit in the future.