Hal 9000 in real?

One of the things that amazed those of us who have seen Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey was Hal 9000, the supercomputer who could understand and talk human language and eventually took over the spaceship when his judgment and intelligence was challenged by the crew. IBM's Watson seems to be an artificial intelligence experiment bringing us closed to Hal 9000. I enjoyed the Watson Trivia Challenge but I could not beat Watson in the end!
Interesting stuff: such a Watson could make call centers obsolete overnight! Artificial Intelligence based Social CRM?

Ubiquitous Commerce (Internet of Things) Part II

Interesting IBM Video about the Internet of Things: Great stuff or Scary stuff? Judge for yourself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfEbMV295Kk