11 hours ago Mar. 20, 2014 - 7:13 AM PDT

As cognitive computing or artificial intelligence grows in capability, what skills should humans acquire? According to AlchemyAPI CEO Elliot Turner, we will need to shift our educational focus away from the kind of stuff that computers can do better.

Speaking at Gigaoms Structure Data 2014 show in New York alongside Stephen Gold, the head of sales for IBMs Watson program, Turner said there was still a lot of runway to go before we fleshies find ourselves struggling to find purpose. While systems coming online today are amazingyou can still have a person read a document better than a machine can today, he said.

Weve just got to focus on the things that make us special and move away from this historical view of rote memorization, because thats not going to be as useful a skill, Turner said.

Indeed, natural language recognition is starting to evolve to the point where cognitive computing systems such as Watson can take information and understand it in a learning sense.

Gold said this would have great application in fields such as medicine. He described a near future in which physicians would have artificial intelligence-based assistants that can recognize the applicability of the outcome of some obscure trial and regurgitate it as needed.

This may seem quasi-magical now, but as Turner pointed out, were pretty good at taking huge leaps in cognitive computing for granted once weve had them around for a bit: As soon as these technologies come online and are integrated with our daily lives, we stop thinking of them that way Oh, its speech recognition.

Photo courtesy Jakub Mosur.

Subscriber Content

Continue reading here:

The rise of artificial intelligence means we need to focus on the things that make us special