I was on the BBC Radio 4's Today Programme responding to pretty much this exact question. Could an algorithm run the government? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme

I was on the BBC Radio 4's Today Programme responding to pretty much this exact question. Could an algorithm run the government? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02np2dg http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02np2dg I believe not, as Watson is a solution to the Big Database problem of finding relevant information from a massive corpus, but I am not convinced that that's what enables human intelligence, preferring the views that intelligence is necessarily context specific (there is no objective "intelligent" act or being) and is enacted between an environment, body, and culture, rather than processing of patterns of simulation in the brain.