Most people have heard of IBM even if they don't know what the letters stand for. Now there's a new addition to the IBM family called "IBM Watson." Never heard of it? You're not alone there. Though IBM is a common household name, its new branches may not be.

What if I told you that IBM’s Watson has to do with Artificial Intelligence? Technology continues to advance at such a rapid rate that the age of Artificial Intelligence (or A.I.) is already upon us and many of us don’t even see it affecting our daily lives.

Before you start to panic over the idea of Artificial Intelligence and begin to expect a robot uprising to doom us all; let’s go into exactly what A.I. means and what IBM’s Watson is all about.

Since the first “computer”, ENIAC was invented (by two guys named Eckert and Mauchly UPenn in 1946, humans have really taken advantage of the conveniences its brought to our lives. Chances are you’re reading this on a computer, smartphone or tablet. With one click, you can search the web, and thousands of articles about ENIAC  are at our fingertips. It’s super easy to travel the web to find almost anything. Would you like to know the distance between the Earth and Mars? Or maybe you’re interested in a new TINY recipe? Or learn how to make the perfect tower of cars. It's all right in front of you.

Now, what if you wanted to play chess or win Jeopardy! You read that right, win Jeopardy!  IBM first started Watson as a machine called Deep Blue, a game-winning computer. It won a game of chess against world champion, Garry Kasparov. IBM would later go on to create Watson, a question answering supercomputer that would compete in Jeopardy against two human contestants.

Sure, people play games against a computer all the time. What makes Watson so special?

Watson was built and designed specifically with the game show in mind, the folks at IBM wanted to create a machine that could outmatch any human. With language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning and, wait for it…. learning.

The ability to LEARN how to research and pull information from a vast database. The ability to know that it NEEDED to learn, to find information, and to apply it to the question at hand. That is at the heart (pun intended) of the story here. This machine could learn and adapt, making it not only a tool but an artificial intelligence.

Is it really? Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist and a Pulitzer Prize-Winning author, seems to think that “Watson is not real artificial intelligence.” He alleges that Watson is “just a text search algorithm connected to a database, just like Google search. It doesn’t understand what it’s reading.”

So the debate is on, Watson can text search, and is able to construct a coherent and correct statement. While anyone can pull up a Google search and answer with the first thing they read, Watson goes one step further to prove and find evidence backing its answer. In fact, while on Jeopardy! Watson did not always buzz first and was beat by the human competitors to the buzzer a number of times.

But considering what artificial intelligence really means – that a machine will mimic the cognitive functions of human thought. This includes learning and problem solving just like we do.

Still wondering how IBM's Watson applies to your daily life and why you should care? In the 2017 Super Bowl, H&R Block aired a commercial with Jon Hamm as he stated that the “most powerful tools our species has created” was going to be helping you with your taxes. What can the big W do for your tax preparation?

Bill Cobb, H&R Block’s president and CEO said “By combining the human expertise, knowledge, and judgment of our tax professionals with the cutting-edge cognitive computing power of Watson, we are creating a future where our clients will benefit from an enhanced experience and our tax pros will have the latest technology to help them ensure every deduction and credit is found.”  The video here tells the story.

So next time you hear about IBM’s Watson, remember it’s the very same computer that won a game of Jeopardy in 2008 that is now making our lives easier in ways we couldn’t ever have imagined.