Why geopolitical superpowers are racing to perfect artificial intelligence

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.