“I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”

So said Ken Jennings, the second place finisher to IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer in last week’s Jeopardy game show contest. This win was more significant than the 1997 defeat of the world chess champion by a different IBM supercomputer, because the format of Jeopardy requires the contestant to understand weird nuances of the English language.

Take this sample from the Before & After category: “Macedonian world conqueror who became a tragic F. Scott Fitzgerald hero”. The correct response is “Who is Alexander the Great Gatsby”, and Watson was able to understand the natural language used to give the correct answer.

The good news is Watson isn’t a true thinking machine. It’s programmed to solve specific problems, which in this case is to answer Jeopardy problems. But it’s a huge leap forward for artificial intelligence.

You and I still have an advantage over computers. We can recognize the context of a question or visual image, discriminate for the useful and relevant information, and answer the question or identify the image.
For example, you and I can look at a strawberry plant, and determine which strawberries are ripe, and which ones aren’t. We also have incredibly precise hands and arms to pluck the ripe strawberries without damaging them or the plant.

Until this year, humans could do the job better. But Japanese scientists have developed a strawberry-picking robot that identifies ripe strawberries, cuts them from the vine, and collects them in a soft basket. The robot is about 40 percent more efficient than humans, and can work 24 hours a day. Of course, the robot is quite expensive given the low selling prices of strawberries, but this is only the first try.
This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. Eventually, it will become much cheaper to produce strawberries, driving down the cost, and making it easier to feed another billion people.

Watson’s first job will be to help doctors analyze the symptoms of their patients. If you’ve ever watched a hospital drama on TV, no doubt you’ve seen the know-it-all doctor gather the interns around a patient to discuss the symptoms and guess at the malady. “All right, his skin is slightly green, he’s experiencing wild mood swings, and his muscle growth is exponentially increasing. What’re we looking at here people?”

Either the Jolly Green Giant is having an adverse reaction to steroids, or somebody made Bruce Banner angry. Doctors would normally have to recall lots of information from their own brains to determine what the malady is, or read through the patient’s electronic medical record for an hour or so.

Watson will be able to give the doctor an instant diagnosis and treatment plan, which compiles all of the patient’s issues, all past instances of the medical problem (ever), and the latest research to provide the best answer.

That’s great news for patients and insurance companies, who will save lots of money by avoiding an incorrect diagnosis, but it’s not so great news for doctors. Sure, they’ll save time with Watson, but that skill (which we pay a premium for) will no longer be required.

Radiologists have already suffered job losses from outsourcing to India, and soon will face the same problems with computers that are intelligent enough to read an x-ray. Lawyers are losing the ability to bill clients for research time, since new software can do that automatically. Even drug-sniffing dogs are likely to be replaced in the next ten years by computers that can better distinguish smells.

There have been plenty of doomsayers who say that technology is going to destroy jobs, but this isn’t a “we’re all gonna be unemployed” rant (insert Obama joke here). It’s more of a wake-up call to how we look at work.

For the near future, computers and robots are going to slowly replace some very specialized jobs, such as travel agents, stock traders, librarians and cashiers. The trick may be to have a general range of experience in addition to your specialty, and be willing to recognize that your specialty has disappeared.

I once interviewed a person from the old Bon Marché, who worked as a planner (plans the store layout of the merchandise). She was laid off when Macy’s got rid of all of the planners, and was looking for another planning job. I asked her if she would consider a purchasing job or customer service management. Nope. She only wanted another job just like the one she had, for the same $55,000 salary.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that those days were gone. Software replaced her skill, and my store didn’t have anyone making that much in salary, not even me. She identified herself by her very specialized job, and not as a knowledgeable retailer with planning skills.

Think more like an entrepreneur, and less like a worker bee. We need that spirit if we’re going to stay ahead of our future computer overlords.