I'm sure you've heard about the Jeopardy shows where the nation's two best players competed against the IBM super-smart computer, Watson.  Watson won.  And won big.  And now the rest of us are left wondering what the implications are for our society; a society where we are out-smarted by the machines we have invented.  If Watson can understand, process, and respond to all the fine nuances of our language and has untold amounts of data storage, is there anything it can't do?

Not to get all sci-fi on you, but does anyone else think it is a little unnerving?  Watson is probably not going to go rogue and try to take over the world but we humans are supposed to be at the top of smarty pants pyramid, aren't we?  Who does this computer think he is?  I suppose there is consolation in that if Watson gets too big for his britches he can always be unplugged.  Ha!  Take that!

On the plus side, if computer programers can teach a machine to understand the finer nuances of language, they may be able to develop a translation software that actually works. To this point there isn't a translation program that can accurately translate difficult sayings, expressions, and idiomatic phrases.  But maybe Watson, or someone like him, could.