So much to respond to here on the blog lately. I used to be a big Jeopardy fan, but haven't seen it in quite a while. So I still haven't seen the famous Watson games, though I have read a bit about them. Maybe if I had seen them in person would have been more troubled, as Mrs. Herzog was, but I am really not troubled by it at all. While it is of course true that Watson has no soul, and I can imagine a "Brave New World" scenario that would be problematic. For example, in a class discussion, Chana Garbow mentioned an article that she read in Time magazine that predicted that within a generation or two the capabilities of robots would continue advancing exponentially, to the point where they could make other robots and cut humans out of the process. (Honestly, I haven't read it, but the theory as I heard it sounds fishy - because the high speed of the automobile increased at a certain rate from the early 20th century for many years, didn't mean that by now we would have cars going thousands of MPH - technology progresses until it hits a wall beyond which it can't advance and then it move outward instead of upward.)
That's not what's happening here. They aren't claiming that these robots can serve on a jury or be a friend, psychologist, Rabbi or quarterback . They're saying it can excel at Jeopardy; it can gather and sort through many bits of information faster than humans. This is news? That's what computers do. People don't succeed on Jeopardy because of their soul (except maybe the small talk with Alex after the first commercial - they still do that, right?), they win because they are better than the competing humans at performing in a computer-like fashion.
What do you think?
1 comment:
Having personally watched Watson on Jeopardy,it seemed as though the key to Watson's success was that it was quicker with the buzzer, not necessarily that it had access to more information than the human contestants. In fact, Ken Jennings, one of the contestants playing against Watson, knew the answers many times, but Watson beat him to the buzzer.
Although computers contain an entire internet's worth of information, I think that as long as humans continue to be educated, we can be considered just as smart as computers. We can constantly learn new things and "add information" into our brains. The people behind websites and technology are the reason that the internet has information on it in the first place. One advantage that people have over computers is that we can add to our own knowledge and grow from the things we learn.
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