Man versus machine

Tonight I watched Jeopardy. Why am I even saying that? Jeopardy, the popular and very durable classic of game shows, was surely watched by many, and some did so with a deep-seated feeling of guilt, as a secret, unmentionable addiction.

But today was different. The venue was in New York state, on an IBM campus; the players were two old veterans, the highest prize winners of Jeopardy’s history. The third participant was an IBM computer, a huge array of servers, programmed by a team of artificial intelligence engineers over the last three years. They fed the computer with encyclopedias, treatises, even the Bible, and a battery of algorithms to bring together all the interrelationships of known facts that are considered the basis of human intelligence. We all have tried to shout at the screen the frequently quirky questions responding to the answers offered as clues. Puns, rhyming slang, literary allusions, lists, sports statistics and pop-song lyrics are the common fare of this game, that tests not only factual knowledge, but also worldliness and with-it-ness.

The purpose of the experiment, according to the IBMers involved, was, not to create a murderous HAL of 2001: a space odyssey fame, but a true thinking machine that could take over many of the human’s tasks, unburdened by human emotions and sentimentality.

It is all the stuff of movies, and many films have presented sinister outcomes to the doings of similar machines. The reasons why there is such a sustained interest in this kind of lucubration are obvious: we are persuaded that humans are at the apex of creation, but taken aback by the imperfections and aberrant behavior that humans frequently exhibit. Also we are profoundly disturbed by our incapacity of defining what makes us human, distinct from other animal species, and why we deserve the exalted position that we have assigned to ourselves. We are hoping that by creating machines that exhibit our brilliance, and are devoid of our faults, we will be able to get to a perfect world. Our perfect offspring, albeit mechanical, would also conquer our destiny: aging and death.

The IBM computer competitor is named Watson, not after Conan Doyle’s character, but the company’s founding family. In this first confrontation, the simple Jeopardy first level, Watson did quite well, ending in a draw with one of the human contestants. The next two days will see Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy. Definitely worth watching on ABC at 7 pm.