Final Jeopardy Read Free Page B

camp—and his team attracted plenty of barbs for it. The
Jeopardy
machine would sidestep the complex architecture of the brain and contrive to answer questions without truly understanding them. “It’s just another gimmick,” said Sajit Rao, a professor in computer science at MIT who’s attempting to teach computers to conceptualize forty-eight different verbs. “It’s not addressing any fundamental problems.” But as Ferrucci countered, teaching a machine to answer complex questions on a broad range of subjects would represent a notable advance, whatever the method.
    IBM’s computer would indeed come to answer a dizzying variety of questions—and would raise one of its own. With machines like this in our future, what do we need to store in our own heads? This question, of course, has been recurring since the dawn of the Internet, the arrival of the calculator, and even earlier. With each advance, people have made internal adjustments and assigned ever larger quantities of memory, math, geography, and more to manmade tools. It makes sense. Why not use the resources at hand? In the coming age, it seems, forgoing an effective answering tool will be like volunteering for a lobotomy.
    In a sense, many of us living through this information revolution share something with the medieval monks who were ambushed by the last one. They spent years of their lives memorizing sacred texts that would soon be spilling off newfangled printing presses. They could have saved lots of time, and presumably freed up loads of capacity, by archiving those texts on shelves. (No need to discuss here whether the monks were eager for “free time,” a concept dangerously close to Sloth, the fourth of the Seven Deadly Sins.) In the same way, much of the knowledge we have stuffed into our heads over the years has been rendered superfluous by new machinery.
    So what does this say about Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the humans preparing to wage cognitive war with Watson? Are they relics? Sure, they might win this round. But the long-term prognosis is grim. Garry Kasparov, the chess master who fell to IBM’s Deep Blue, recently wrote that the golden age of man-machine battles in chess lasted from 1994 to 2004. Before that decade, machines were too dumb; after it, the roles were reversed. While knowledge tools, including Watson, relentlessly advance, our flesh-and-blood brains, some argue, have stayed more or less the same for forty thousand years, treading evolutionary water from the Cro-Magnon cave painters to Quentin Tarantino.
    A few decades ago, know-it-alls like Ken Jennings seemed to be the model of human intelligence. They aced exams. They had dozens of facts at their fingertips. In one quiz show that predated
Jeopardy, College Bowl,
teams of the brainiest students would battle one another for the honor of their universities. Later in life, people turned to them in boardrooms, university halls, and cocktail parties for answers. Public education has been designed, in large part, to equip millions with a ready supply of factual answers. But if Watson can top them, what is this kind of intelligence worth?
    Physical strength has suffered a similar downgrade. Not so long ago, a man with superhuman strength played a valuable role in society. He was a formidable soldier. When villagers needed boulders moved or metal bent, he got the call. After the invention of steam engines and hydraulic pumps, however, archetypal strongmen were shunted to jobs outside the productive economy. They turned to bending metal in circuses or playing noseguard on Sunday afternoons. For many of us, physical strength, once so vital, has become little more than a fashion statement. Modern males now display muscles as mating attire, much the way peacocks fan their otherwise useless feathers.
    It would be all too easy to dismiss human foes of the IBM machine as cognitive versions of circus strongmen: trivia wunderkinds. But from the very