I am family with a number of people working for IBM, which is in the process of designing a computer called Watson, which will one day compete on Jeopardy. Watson is being designed to be able to decode natural language to answer questions in a gameshow format. The development of Watson raises important ethical questions. In Age of the Spiritual Machine, Ray Kurzweill, a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) explains the ethical dilemmas in one of the most thought provoking books I have ever read.
