I.B.M.'s Watson - Computers Close In on the 'Paris Hilton' Problem

At one laboratory, a small group of scientists and engineers worked to replace the human mind, while at the other, a similar group worked to augment it. In 1963 the mathematician-turned-computer scientist John McCarthy started the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The researchers believed that it would take only a decade to create a thinking machine. Also that year the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart formed what would become the Augmentation Research Center to pursue a radically different goal -- designing a computing system that would instead "bootstrap" the human intelligence of small groups of scientists and engineers. For the past four decades that basic tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation -- A.I. versus I.A. -- has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies that are transforming the world.