Beating lowly humans on Jeopardy was just the beginning. IBM's famed Watson supercomputer will soon be available as a commercialized analytics tool for data-heavy industries like healthcare, telecom and financial services.
IBM expects to generate billions in new revenue by 2015 by putting Watson to work. The technology giant has already sold Watson to health-care clients, helping WellPoint Inc. (WLP) and Seton Health Family analyze data to improve care.
Smart machines probably won't kill us all—but they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.
And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.
It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore.