Watson may be far more than you "think".

I don't see this technology as a good thing.  As we rely more on computers to do our thinking for us, we lose our ability to think. One example of this is our reliance on diagnostic machines in healthcare to prescribe drugs and procedures that attempt to control individual symptoms instead of addressing the human body holistically.  Blind embracement of technology has moved us away from thousands of years of common sense and intuition in favor of the accepted (but flawed) scientific method, which creates more problems than it solves.

Besides, I think many of these proposed applications are just ways to get the public to accept this technology when there is clearly another agenda.  For example, the most sinister thing about Watson is that it's another way for companies to monitor us as "consumers", anticipating our thoughts and impulses so they can sell us more stuff we don't need.

This is IBM's euphemized version of what I mean:

"Part of IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative, the newest capabilities of IBM Watson are a natural fit for customer engagement, based on its ability to understand the nuances of human language, process questions akin to the way people think, and quickly cull through vast amounts of big data for relevant, evidence-based responses to its human users' needs.

The rise of the digital consumer has spawned a range of online, mobile and social media commerce trends that require businesses to deepen their interactions with customers and transform the way they provide marketing, sales and service. Consumers expect brands to know them individually, deliver personalized interactions and self service options. Business leaders -- such as chief marketing officers, customer experience leaders and heads of sales -- must transform the way they interact with consumers to build brand loyalty and improve customer service."

Read between the lines.  They've reduced us to "human users" and "consumers."  Are we so conditioned to these terms that we no longer find them offensive or intrusive?  Even describing Watson as an "ecosystem" is revolting to me because in doing so it redefines the word that describes the natural order of life on this planet.

If we allow ourselves to stop and think about it, we realize that we are living on the precipice of potential global annihilation due to unbridled, greed-driven consumerism gobbling up the last of the finite resources of our precious planet.  But instead of addressing the consequences of our industrialized lifestyle - the fact that we've poisoned the air, land, water, and every life-giving aspect of Gaia - we'd rather embrace another fancy widget to distract us from the monsters we've created.

Is that what we really need?  Or are we just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship?

Wouldn't it be great if instead of using Watson to create more of the same corporate capitalist paradigm, it was used to solve the fundamental problems that are essential to our very survival?

Yah, this is kind of scarry but thanks for the post - it's good to know what's coming down the pipeline. Too bad, it could have genuine good uses but IBM obviously has no intension for that - having Watson working on the cancer cure "problem" both perpetuates the myth that there are no good cures already and also makes their new super computer sound so benign. It's far more likely it will be used for problems like predicting and controling human behavior.