Before now, he said, many of the attempts to recreate biological brains in silicon have focused on the cognitive systems found in humans, monkeys and mice.

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The arrival of the Watson system will enable new leading-edge research at Rensselaer, and afford faculty and students an opportunity to find new uses for Watson and deepen the systems' cognitive capabilities.

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Moreover, the human system is not much different than most mammalian systems and so positing cognitive causes as the source seems sketchy at best.

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But if they have the same cognitive limitations as consumers, should they be designing systems of consumer protection?

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So, good list, Forbes, but you left out the most important tools of all, the cognitive artifacts that have truly made us smart: writing and notational systems, objects of travel and information technology, which really picked up somewhere around the development of the telegraph, but could be argued to have developed earlier with the wide variety of signaling systems.

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