IBM’s Watson Has Been “Practicing Insurance Defense for Years”

IBM acknowledged yesterday that its Watson Super Computer has been quietly practicing in an insurance defense firm in California for the past three years and “making some decent money from it.”

“He’s pretty good at it,” said a senior IBM programmer. “Plus, it helps pay our bills. His electrical bill really starts to get up there.”

According to sources who know Watson, he has been practicing with the firm of Schmaltz, Calder & Watson in Sausalito, California, since 2006. He is in the firm’s litigation group, concentrating on insurance defense. “He’s programmed with California’s various insurance laws and with all the forms and decisions affecting litigation,” said one of his programmers. “We just scan the documents in a case, and within forty seconds he has drafted three different appellate briefs, just in case.”

Plaintiffs’ personal injury attorneys, however, are not impressed. “He’s an asshole, if you ask me,” said John Throckmorton, a local attorney. “Listen, he’s got a fax machine embedded in his loins. He’ll fax a 40 page memo on a stupid and arcane discovery issue, on a Sunday night, just to say ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ I asked how could he sleep at night and he just laughed.”

Elinor Hastings-Urban, a products liability specialist, litigated a case against Watson “and it wasn’t fun. At one point I handed over direct exam of my own witnesses — he was lip synching my questions and livetweeting them anyway, and predicting what I was going to ask and how he was going to object. Where’s the fun in that?”