What’s next, Dr. Watson?

It was sometime during my discovery of Dr. Watson and what IBM has finally managed to do, that it hit me – the fact that there is still, such a vast difference in what we can imagine and what we can execute. You can read all the fiction novels you want and watch all the sci-fi movies that are out there but when it finally comes down to live execution in the real world, there is still a long way for us humans to catch up with our imaginations.

IBM, for all its size and spread, is thankfully still agile enough to pool in its best resources in creating a Dr. Watson, which by the looks of it, has managed to match its human counterparts in understanding human language. The fact that it has beaten the humans at Jeopardy, although great for the media and for getting the recognition the IBM team duly deserves, is no great achievement, as a Dr. Watson is not limited by the size of its database, or the time it takes for it to acquire this information – as humans are.

So now, what’s next for the guys at IBM?

What is the next frontier, after spoken language, that makes us so uniquely human?

An area, where imagination has not reached, and even if it has, then it has not stretched its arms wide, and decided to choose what it wants to prove to the world?

Well it has to be one that catches the attention of the world, more than what Jeopardy managed to do. Jeopardy is still well-known, largely in part due to the fact that the world does import a lot of U.S. movies and television programs.

So what could beat the popularity that the American movie & tv industry has to offer?

Well, one area, for starters is sport.

And when it comes to sport, due to the fact that each country has its own sports and national teams, the selected sport (quite obviously a spectator sport) has to be one that is widely enjoyed and followed the world over.

Imagine large stadiums and the team sports that come to mind are soccer, rugby and cricket.

Now it’s probably premature to imagine robots running around playing soccer (well not just yet) and rugby wouldn’t mean much if one were to beef up robots on the field with metal and steel, but cricket… oh, well, anything is possible for cricket, innit?

Wouldn’t it be great if cricket-lovers the world over could witness the ultimate battle between batsman and bowler being played out between man and machine – where 100 mph trajectories and 0.4-sec batsman reflexes decide the difference between success and victory?

And at the sound of being sacrilegious, would it be such a bad thing if 2 billion people in this world could sleep in peace knowing that the skill it requires to be the best batsman in the world can be learnt, imbibed and saved for all posterity.

Signed,
A Sachin Tendulkar fan, writing this during what could be his last World Cup