Watson: More than Meets the Eye?

While I don't normally watch Jeopardy!, choosing instead to have my friend Charles ask me the previous night's Final Jeopardy question at lunch every day, I did tune in on Monday night to watch Ken Jennings and the other guy whose name escapes me play against "Watson," the Jeopardy! supercomputer. As someone who always likes to be in the know when it comes to TV special events, I wanted to see what all the hype was about.

From what I was able to gather from the 15,000 special segments in which Alex Trebek explained Watson to us, a bunch of very intelligent people and tech gurus programmed Watson to be able to defeat real live humans at trivia, by turning him into this mega search engine not connected to the internet. The way I understood it is that programming Watson was akin to filling him with a set of World Book Encyclopedias and giving him the ability to sift through information at supersonic speed and to one day take over the world. It's sort of like Transformers, except not. While I admit that I like Transformers as much as the next person who doesn't have discriminating taste in action movies and who's bored on a summer night and decides to spend $15 to watch both Transformers I and II On Demand and who then later mildly regrets having done so, if you think watching the Transformers answer trivia questions to defeat humans is interesting, you're crazy. It's not.

And yet despite my misgivings, I tuned in to Jeopardy! anyway. One minute into the show, after Alex Trebek introduced Watson, I texted a friend, saying, "I think I hate Watson." Then after maybe 2 minutes of actual playing time--and there really wasn't that much playing time because the majority of the first half hour was devoted to explaining how awesome IBM is--when Watson was winning by like a million dollars, I texted, "I definitely hate Watson." The problem was that watching a computer buzz in and answer questions faster than Ken Jennings and The Other Guy to me did not seem like a celebration of the amazing capacity of technology; it just seemed like confirmation that computers are faster and more knowledgeable than humans, and since I actually use a computer many many times every day, I don't really need confirmation that a computer is faster and more knowledgeable than I am. I already know that, and I'm cool with it.

I also know there were probably all kinds of IBM guys in some room eating pizza at a "Watson party," high-fiving each other for revolutionizing the world, but I found the whole thing to be utterly dull. I think Jeopardy! misjudged its public. I got the distinct impression that I was supposed to want Watson to win, but I didn't, and I don't think too many other people did either.

I love technology and rely on it all the time, but by Jeopardy!+IBM's rationale, I should just go ahead and embrace the fact that humans are inferior and superfluous. By extension, I guess I should be thrilled to speak to an automated voice when I call customer service numbers, I shouldn't want to hurt people when they text in movie theaters, and I should look forward to the day when robots rule the world. Oh, and I suppose while I'm at it, I should probably also have rooted for Ivan Drago and his Soviet super skills and high tech computerized treadmill to defeat Rocky who had to train by running through Siberia and lifting an old wagon with people in it. I'm sorry, IBM--a lot of things could happen, but that's not one of them.