In Rumsefeldian terms, IBM’s Watson has moved from fun and games to known unknowns. The AI is now being used to nudge researchers in the right direction when they’re tackling unsolved problems. From Jessica Leber at Fast Company:

“When IBM’s advanced artificial intelligence program Watson beat Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in 2011, it was an impressive feat for a computer–but still, it was only processing information that humans already knew in order to answer trivia questions.

As IBM attempts to turn Watson into a new line of business and make it useful in a wide range of industries that are dealing lately with an overwhelming amount of data, it’s now working to push the software, which excels at learning and interpreting human language, forward into the realm of the unknown.

‘It’s not giving answers that people know anymore, it’s pointing people in directions that they should investigate,’ says IBM Watson group vice president John Gordon. ‘We’re talking about a computing system that inspires people.’

At an event in New York today, IBM showed off the ways some of its early customers are using the Watson ‘Discovery Advisor’ in research, development, and innovation, especially in the realm of biotech and life sciences. Watson’s aim is to speed up discoveries by teams of researchers by, for example, scanning and interpreting millions of scientific books, articles, and data points–far more than any person’s brain could analyze–and generating new hypothesis or leads that might be fruitful to investigate. Or, as Gordon puts it, Watson gives researchers ‘smarter hunches.'”