This is a great perspective. I would add that people are less impressed by Watson not just because it's an incremental step, but because they don't understand t

This is a great perspective. I would add that people are less impressed by Watson not just because it's an incremental step, but because they don't understand the principles and advances Watson is designed to showcase. From what I gather about the coverage of Watson in traditional media, this seems to be billed as, "Can a machine out-think a human? Tune in at 7:30pm to find out!" To most modern people, this is kind of a yawner. Of course a machine can "out-think" (read: think faster than) a human. It wouldn't be very exciting if the news came on and talked excitedly about a computer that could perform long division faster than a human, either. But that's not really what Watson represents, is it? The importance of Watson is something that doesn't register with most lay people: The processing of natural language into 'machine readable' data, then querying an enormous database to find relevant info, then choosing the best answer.... "Isn't that what Google does? Like, millions of times a day? What's the big deal?" (Disclaimer: Most people have better things to worry about than advancess in AI and ML, so I'm not saying it's a bad thing they don't understand what makes Watson special "under the hood." And to be fair, I was way more impressed by Word Lens than I am by Watson.) tl;dr: The concepts that make Watson so impressive aren't easily discernible from what already exists in the world, for most people.