Natural language is an artifact of human communication, so the most obvious application is human interaction. Eventually (who knows how long it will be), you may be talking to a Watson descendant for most interactions with businesses -- everything from requesting online help on a website to ordering your cheeseburger at McDonald's.<p>"A Big Mac? Wouldn't you like a nice order of Global Thermonuclear War instead?"<p>Like Ken Jennings and Kent Brokman, I too welcome our new (computer) overlords. Bring it on, Skynet.
Take the Red pill, dude.<p>All joking aside, I think the long-term implications are closer to the computer on Star Trek than to the Matrix or Skynet. Better natural language understanding and information retrieval should make it easier to ask a computer to find information for us and do tasks for us. I don't think any of this has much to do with the computer become self-aware and deciding that it should take control of mankind's future...
I doubt that there will be many, if any, implications. As a narrow AI system Watson is unlikely to have wider applicability or scalability. It's the classic dilemma of narrow AI.<p>People asked similar questions after the famous Kasparov defeat to Deep Blue. That event did have implications for chess players, but not much beyond that.