Humans in Jeopardy?

Humans in Jeopardy?

by Paul Asay

So for those of you who missed it, Watson—IBM's wicked smart supercomputer—beat renowned Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a much-hyped three-day smackdown on the game show. Watson pocketed $77,147 in cash (along with a $1 million grand prize), while Jennings and Rutter won $24,000 and $21,600 respectively. And, as you can see from this practice round, it didn't look like the show's carbon-based players ever had a chance.

Big whup, right? On the surface, the story has about as much intrigue as the revelation that refrigerators keep food cold. I mean, we know that computers can store gobs of information (and can be pretty quick with that Jeopardy buzzer, too). Come to think of it, most of the useless, trivial information I get these days comes from my computer. The fact that one would do well on Jeopardy would seem, on the surface, to be kind of a yawner.

And yet, I think the Jeopardy match might've been the most significant happening I've seen on TV in quite a while.

Watson's televised showdown wasn't so much about trivia as it was about language—and Watson's ability to communicate with us on our own terms.

"Unlike even the most advanced Internet search engines, which can only find results for specific requests, Watson can make connections between words and determine a logical answer from imputed data," writes Michelle Castillo of Time. Apparently, Watson's next gig will be in the medical field, where doctors hope its binary bedside manner will be a boon.

"I think it's going to usher in the next generation of medicine," Eliot Siegel, a professor at Maryland's department of diagnostic radiology, told Time. "It takes me 20 minutes to an hour or more to read through a patient's electronic medical record. Having a computer understand and present the information to me is a huge step towards allowing me to make a better diagnosis. It is really the future of medicine."

Which is great. I guess.

But I think all of us—perhaps because we've grown up watching too many Terminator movies—grow just a bit uneasy when computers start beating us at stuff.

This week, Time also ran a fascinating story titled "2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal." The story focuses on the concept of singularity—the hypothetical moment when computers truly do become smarter than people. It's a controversial theory, and lots of folks doubt whether we'll ever get there. But some futurist thinkers believe that, given the exponential growth of computing power, it's just a matter of time. Writes Lev Grossman:

It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011.

For some, this future world might sound exciting. But for me, who has spent probably more time than I ought pondering the nature of the human soul, it's troubling. A friend of mine said the trend feels a bit like the Tower of Babel, and I get the connection. It feels as if, as we push technologically ever forward, we're almost playing God—or perhaps creating one of our own.

We're not there yet, and we won't get there (even if such things are possible) for a while. This from PC World:

To construct Watson, IBM used 200 million pages of content stored on 4 terabytes of disk space, as much as 16 terabytes of memory (reports have varied), about 2,800 processor cores and approximately 6 million logic rules to determine the best answers. Watson took up 10 server racks, each with 10 IBM Power 750 servers and two large refrigeration units all of which was housed in its own room on IBM's Yorktown Heights campus. All that for a computer that can parse language via text files, and not through voice-based input as the Star Trek computer does.

All to compete with our compact human brain in a very specific, very narrow endeavor.

Still, it makes me wonder.

When Jennings wrote down his final Jeopardy answer—long after the outcome was a foregone conclusion—he cheekily added, "I for one welcome our new computer overlords," a riff off a line from The Simpsons.

I laughed. A little nervously, but I laughed.