IBM's Watson Goes To College To Extend Abilities

An anonymous reader writes in with news that IBM's Jeopardy winning supercomputer is going back to school"A modified version of the powerful IBM Watson computer system, able to understand natural spoken language and answer complex questions, will be provided to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, making it the first university to receive such a system. IBM announced Wednesday that the Watson system is intended to enable upstate New York-based RPI to find new uses for Watson and deepen the systems' cognitive computing capabilities - for example by broadening the volume, types, and sources of data Watson can draw upon to answer questions."

This bit bothers me for some reason

[eksith]

"RPI will extend Watson's reasoning and cognitive abilities to finance, information technology, business analytics, and other areas, IBM says."

The reason we go to school (at first at least) is really to learn how to learn. Which is what this is doing right now so when it has perfected the ability to learn, there's no real limit to what it can learn considering... well, brain in NAS, not skull.

Are we sure this thing has a kill-switch somewhere?

Re:This bit bothers me for some reason

[TapeCutter]

Ok, I'll feed you. You're not impressed because (like my wife) you simply don't understand the difficulty of the problem. Watson's Jeopardy answers are in the form of a question and performed in realtime, it is not plugged into a database of questions, it extracts relationships from data via an algorithm (ie: it learns), different from how humans learn, but demonstrably superior to any human in terms of both speed and accuracy.