What Watson can't do

People are still talking about how IBM's Watson supercomputer destroyed two Jeopardy champions over a recent three-day contest.

Watson was impressive in its ability to understand complex, nuanced statements, and then search text databases to assemble the correct questions. Even the silly mistakes it made, like naming Toronto in a question about U.S. cities, seemed somehow charming.

It made me think about how many tasks computers have replaced over the last 20 years or so. The best chess players are made of silicon. Assembly line workers are now Walmart greeters, their jobs replaced by manufacturing robots. Photo retouching was once a craft and fine art, practiced by a select few using "air brushes"; now photo retouching is what our kids do to a photo before they post it on Facebook. Kindles and iPads may replace books before long. I've been reading that Watson may soon appear in hospitals, helping to diagnose patients.

And does anybody have just a phone anymore?

Yet fortunately for writers such as myself, there is one thing that computers are not much better at than they were 20 years ago, and that is writing. I believe that is because writing is an extension of thought itself, and for all their marvelous powers, computers cannot think. At all.

Watson, like its close kins Google and Bing, has an uncanny ability to find relevant results. But it is still a GIGO device (garbage in, garbage out). For thinking about a problem, identifying what needs to be discovered, and phrasing the right search query, human thinking is still required. And thinking is exactly what is required of writers, as well as marketers, product managers, sales directors, and all the other very human endeavors of business.

I take comfort in knowing that, despite IBM's supercomputer technology, years of research and teams of AI experts, Watson still cannot come close to doing what most of us do every single day. Write a simple letter, in plain English.