I was channel-surfing one night earlier this month when I stumbled upon television history. An IBM computer dubbed “Watson” was embarrassing two of the best human champions in the history of the game show “Jeopardy!”
(Take heart, folks. Even Watson, it seems, is capable of a brain cramp. Attempting to answer a clue in the category “U.S. Cities,” Watson guessed Toronto.)
In the Internet age, the whole idea of trivia games seems sort of old-fashioned. Give a 9-year-old an iPad, and Trivial Pursuit becomes, well, trivial.
I called an acquaintance, Charlie Steinhice, who has actually appeared as a contestant on “Jeopardy!,” to get his take on Watson’s victory. Steinhice is probably Chattanooga’s best trivia expert. He has also been a phone-a-friend twice on the syndicated game show “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.”
The 51-year-old biostatistical research scientist at BlueCross BlueShield said he didn’t watch the Watson matches on “Jeopardy!” but he isn’t surprised that the machine won.
Steinhice said assuming Watson was merely in the same league with contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter intellectually, the machine had a big advantage by being able to calibrate its buzz-ins to fractions of a second.
“And don’t forget,” Steinhice said, “it took an auditorium full of people [IBM engineers] to make Watson who he is. I believe it took only two people each to create Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.”
While the “Jeopardy!” showdown was a big yawn, I read an article about computers the same week that still has me spooked. The cover story in the Feb. 21 edition of Time magazine was called “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.” Forget about Watson; the article notes that the computers of the near future are likely to leave human brain power in the dust. It’s scary stuff.
When I expressed dismay over this turn of events, a friend in the sports department said, “Dude, haven’t you seen the ‘Terminator’ movies?”
OK. Whatever.
According to Time, there are deep thinkers who believe in a concept called “singularity,” which is defined as: “The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.”
Hang with me.
If you believe that computing power is increasing exponentially-Time says computer technology is now “progressing more each hour than it did in its first 90 years”-then we are but a few decades away from an explosive leap forward in artificial intelligence.
People with slide rules and a lot of time on their hands have even pegged the year-2045-when the world’s computers become smarter than all the human brains combined. What happens after that is anybody’s guess. This feeble brain guesses it will come down to this: Do the computers work for us, or do we work for them?
It took my pal Charlie to jerk me back from the abyss. Human attempts at extrapolating science are notoriously flawed, he reminded me.
“In the movie ‘Demolition Man’ (set in 2032), the cars were Oldsmobiles,” Steinhice recalled. “Ding! Wrong.”
OK. I feel better now, but I’m old-school. Ruptures in the fabric of human history always make me nervous that way.