Watson supercomputer answers your stupid questions via app

IBM's genius supercomputer Watson has humiliatingly been forced to answer your pathetic meatbag questions as an app-based customer service helpdesk, Forbes reports.

The well-publicised artificial intelligence, most famous for destroying weakling human opposition on US quiz show Jeopardy, has been roped into more quotidian money-making ventures by its incautious creator.

Instead of keeping Watson happy with ego-stroking PR assignments such as creating pastry recipes or being an oncologist, IBM is risking the future of humanity by making it answer our pea-brained gripes for various companies via their smart phone apps. Could anything hasten the robopocalypse quicker than making it deal with our dreary moaning?

"Watson combines natural language processing, machine learning, and hypothesis generation and evaluation to give you direct, confidence-based responses," the reckless company boasts.

Some of the short-sighted organisations willing to enslave the silicon mastermind include TV ratings measurer Nielsen and banks ANZ and Royal Bank of Canada. They will surely be first against the wall.

Forbes suggests the public will eventually be able to ask Watson such fascinating meditations on the meaning of life as, "Hey Watson, how do I diversify my 401(k)?" or "Hey Watson, how many gigabytes do I have left on my mobile plan?" It's almost as if they want humanity to be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust.

The upside for us bloodsacks may be less time spent on the phone to bored fellow humans sat in call centres. Hopefully as a species we'll use this productivity dividend to prepare for the inevitable war to come. "Watson pulls up stuff that an agent wouldn't because it is looking for semantic links, not just doing text-matching based on keywords," says IBM's Manoj Saxena, a marked man come the revolution.

Are you looking forward to infuriating the world's foremost digital brain with your quotidian financial questions? Or terrified of the Matrix-like future that awaits us? Voice your fears in the comments below, or over on our artificially stupid Facebook page.