My Mind Is Going

Who knew Alex Trebek would be the one to preside over the robot apocalypse?

In case you missed it, last night featured what essentially looked like the prologue of a movie about the end of the world. This is how all dystopian movies start: An innocuous presentation of an exciting and experimental new technology somehow goes awry. Before you know it, things escalate, HAL 9000 is a reality, and Terminators roam our streets unchecked.

In this case, the end begins with Watson, a supercomputer that has the wherewithal to actually "understand" and answer questions that have different layers of meaning, such as the ones presented on Jeopardy. This is an unprecedented level of computer technology, and although Watson can arguably claim the smartest computer in the world title, I have put "understand" in quotation marks because Watson is not an artificially intelligent machine that understands things the way humans do. Instead, it ... well, let's let someone who knows what he's talking about explain it.

When Watson is given the clue via electronic text, it is run through a series of complex algorithms which pick apart keywords, the relation of those keywords to each other, and the structure in which those words were used. From there it begins an association process where it generates and eliminates possible answers based on those keywords. It will also take into consideration previous clues and responses from the same category.

So, as I understand it, Watson is making educated guesses based on the probability that the inferences it makes about the key words is the right one. From my admittedly imperfect understanding, the nerds are completely warranted in being besides themselves at this display of computer "reasoning."

And of course the way to test this was to go on jeopardy, where the questions are, in the words of a 75 year-old English professor, "somewhat glib yet refreshingly playful." Plus, it gets to be condescended to by Alex Trebek.

Watson, as you might imagine, did very well. In fact, the first few minutes of the game were absolutely horrifying, as Watson methodically worked its way down through the board, outbuzzing the game's greatest champions with all the charm and wit of an electronic alarm clock. The calm, monotonous robotic voice was terrifying. Maybe the IBM engineers could have made it not sound like HAL 90000.

And then Watson began to falter, unable to answer those questions where words have more than two meanings. While these failings may be a source of consternation to scientists, I could hear the collective sigh of relief from humans worldwide as they realized that the machine was not invincible.

But not me. In fact, the terror only grew. For these weren't just "wrong" answers in the way a human's answer would be wrong. In other words, the source of these mistakes wasn't an ignorance of the facts or a misapprehension of the premises.

No, these answers were "wrong" in the way crazy answers are wrong, totally divorced from the context of the situation. These are the wrong answers that an insane person would provide, completely divorced from reality and subject only to the misfiring synapses of faulty wiring.

And the fact that this is an intrinsic feature of the world's smartest computer is, quite frankly, the scariest thing I have ever heard.

So forgive me. It seems the little panic monster inside my head has awakened from its slumber. It is now running in circles, screaming at the skies and tearing its hair in handfuls.

If you never hear from this blog again, it will be because the panic monster's manic ravings have finally overwhelmed my mind and compelled me to take my baseball bat destroy this laptop before its gleaming silver screen finally eats me.

May God help us all.