Reporters' Roundtable Podcast

Big news in AI this week: IBM's Watson project defeated "Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-night prime-time demo match. What does that win mean for computing, and more importantly, for humanity? That's the topic for this week's Reporters' Roundtable, and to discuss it we have two great guests, both with current books on the topics of computer vs. human competition.

First up is Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. Baker reported on the development of Watson from inside IBM headquarters to write this book. He was BusinessWeek's senior technology writer before that.

And branching out a bit from the Watson news, we also have Brian Christian with us. He's the author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, which will be out on March 1. He's also author of the recent Atlantic cover story Mind vs. Machine, which is a great primer for this topic. Both of these works tell the story of Brian's participation in the annual Loebner Prize, in which humans face off with computers in a Turing test competition to convince judges that they are human. Brian, it should be noted, was voted most human.

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On Friday, the Reporters' Roundtable podcast tackles a simple question: what is unique about the human mind? As I write this, IBM's Watson project is doing a respectable job on the game show "Jeopardy." With one game out of three played, the machine is tied against human champion Brad Rutter. Does that mean Watson is as smart as Rutter?

At "Jeopardy," maybe. Or maybe Watson is just a cleverly programmed, pattern-matching supercomputer with an unfair … Read more

Today, we're talking about identity. You own your identity, right? That's why we talk about identity theft: Identity is clearly personal, and it can be stolen from us. But it can also, in some cases, be legally taken. If you work at a modern business and you create relationships with people during that employment, it can be argued that, if those relationships are work-related, your employer owns them. But if you create a rich social profile that supports your work, say on Facebook or Twitter, it can be unclear whose identity, persona, or reputation that is.

Meanwhile, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Google, are becoming de facto universal electronic identity providers. You can log in to many new Web sites with nothing but a Facebook ID. So does Facebook own our identity?

To discuss these topics, we've identified two experts:

Dick Hardt is a champion of what he calls Identity 2.0: a user-centric identity architecture. Previously he worked on OpenID and OAuth and championed identity work at Microsoft. Currently he's working on: an "Address Book 2.0" personal productivity assistant.

Peter Kazanjy is co-founder of Honestly.com. Formerly Unvarnished, Honestly.com is a professional reputation and peer review Web site, where people can rate others in both an authenticated yet anonymous way.

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Sick of your keyboard and mouse? Our touch points with technology are finally expanding beyond them. The Wii gave us motion-controlled games to one extent, and the Kinect took it to the next step: gamers are using their entire bodies for control. Apple, of course, has ushered in an era of multitouch and gesture-based user interfaces, and voice-operated technology is making great strides. What's next? We discuss with Ars Technica's Jon Stokes and Forrester's James McQuivey.

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On January 27, the Egyptian government sought to combat growing public unrest by disconnecting the Internet and mobile phone services--the thinking being that protesters couldn't organize if they couldn't communicate. Ignoring for the moment the fact that there have been protests since long before the Net, this is still a significant and historical action. Previously, Iran and Tunisia have sought to quell protests with similar policies and actions, but the Egyptian example is perhaps the largest and most heavy-handed communications shut-down the modern world has seen.

Our guests for today's discussion are Declan McCullagh, our own political reporter; and Deborah Wheeler, a political science professor who spent the last 10 years in the Middle East studying how social technologies impact politics. Author of The Internet in the Middle East, she teaches as visiting professor at the American University of Kuwait. She is also a professor at one of the U.S. service academies, but the views expressed here are her own.

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Today we are talking about the lines of succession at big and influential technology companies. There are two big news hooks for this show: First, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be stepping out of his day-to-day role for a time for health reasons, leaving operation of the company with Tim Cook. Also, just yesterday Google announced that CEO Eric Schmidt is moving into an evangelist role and handing the CEO title over to co-founder Larry Page.

Reading the tea leaves of CEO moves and succession is like reading a good sports story. We've had other great tales in tech history: Bill Gates leaving Microsoft to his polar opposite Steve Ballmer; and the charismatic Carly Fiorina getting bounced out of HP to be replaced by the disciplined Mark Hurd in 2005, who was himself forced out last year. There are many other stories like this.

How much of a tech company rides on the CEO, and what can a company do to ensure it maintains a working strategy when the CEO leaves -- for whatever reason? Today we're going to talk about CEO succession, with two experts:

First up, Beverly Behan of Board Advisor LLC. She's a board fixer. She's worked with more than 100 boards of directors over the past decade on issues including CEO succession planning, board engagement, board and director evaluation, and other board topics. Bev is author of "Great Companies Deserve Great Boards," which will be out in June, and has a BusinessWeek column called, The Boardroom.

Also joining us is professor Charles Elson, the director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. Charles is a former law professor, a writer for both corporate and popular media, a frequently quoted expert in publications like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post, and a board member himself, at the heath care company HealthSouth.

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Everybody wants a piece of Facebook. The social network has over 600 million subscribers, but more importantly, it's a destination. Most users spend a lot of time on the site, making it an advertising powerhouse, a money machine that potentially could make Google--which is essentially a way station--seem weak in comparison.

Normally, when a tech company gets to this size, it goes public. That means folks like you and me get to buy shares in the company, and participate in its success or failure, by selling our shares to people who value it either at more or less than we do.

The initial public stock offering of a fast-rising tech company is a big deal. IPOs fueled the VC funding industry in the late '90s, and made a lot of people rich. If this were 1999 right now, Facebook would already be public, driven to the exits by investors who would want a return on their funds. Facebook would use the capital raised for expansion.

But it's 2011, and Facebook isn't going public. Instead, it's raising funds and acquiring investors by participating in private markets for its shares. Initially, employees were able to exchange their shares on SecondMarket. More recently, investment bank Goldman Sachs has begun to sell pieces of its own investment in Facebook to some of its clients.

What does this mean for the future Facebook? For investors? And for other tech companies? I'm joined today by the New York Times' Miguel Helft, who is covering Facebook for the paper.

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As always, the new year starts with CES, the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This year, the Roundtable again hit the road, and our first episode of 2011 is a look forward to the year in tech, with three special guests: Rob Enderle, analyst of the Enderle Group; Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3; and Harry McCracken, editor of the independent tech site Technologizer.

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This is the last Reporters' Roundtable of the year, so In keeping with our long-standing, year-old tradition, today's show is our year in review, with our traditional guests: Scott Ard, CNET editor in chief, and Tom Merritt, former CNET podcast host and now host of Tech News Today over on the TWiT network.

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