# Judge Watson - Our Law's in Jeopardy?



## J-Sun (Sep 9, 2011)

Channeling Weird Al a bit there.

Yale Law Journal Ponders the Wisdom of IBM Robot Watson as a Judge

I post this partly because it's interesting but mainly because this sort of thing drives me nuts:



> Watson also has the advantage of not being able to insert his own emotions or opinions into his decisions, by virtue of the fact that, well, he doesn't have any.


No, not directly, but his programmers do. Programs don't just spring out of thin air - there's never a discontinuity between the creator and created. This is all the more important when the software is closed source and you can't see the bias. As I understand it, Watson runs on Linux and parts of it are Apache software but I gather some key pieces are closed. I'm not saying this makes Watson bad or that it shouldn't be used as a helpful clerk (the article, itself, admits it's being inaccurately provocative with its title and this thread is even more inaccurately provocative) but I just find this perception of the "otherness" of software to be annoying. People say, "Man's obsolete and stupid. Computers can beat him at chess and Jeopardy." Um, no, man's so brilliant he can design things that make solving problem sets like chess and Jeopardy easier and easier. Anyway - that's my op-ed for the day. 

But, like I say, the applications of Watson and things like it are interesting in themselves.


----------

