What Would Watson’s Victory Mean?

Barring a miracle, it looks like Watson will defeat the two human “Jeopardy!” champions tomorrow night and claim the crown of world’s biggest nerd. Going into the contest, I had been telling myself that I was for the computer, because a win for Watson was a win for humanity. But last night, when Watson started kicking serious ass, I began to feel queasy. Not for any Skynet-became-self-aware type of reason, but because the sight of Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings being sacrificed to a machine for the greater glory of I.B.M. was a sorry spectacle. My twelve-year-old son couldn’t bear to watch, and went downstairs, no doubt to use the computer.

All that remains is to figure out what Watson’s victory means. That’s one question Watson can’t answer, so it falls to us, the vanquished, to grapple with it. Is Watson a great breakthrough in science—a Sputnik moment—or an elaborate parlor trick? When I asked Steven Pinker this question, he responded:

I don’t rule out the possibility that some components of Watson could both provide insight into human cognition and lay the groundwork for more sophisticated artificial intelligence applications, such as natural language processing (the fancy term for understanding human languages like English, as opposed to computer languages). On the other hand, when a system is designed to meet a highly specific challenge like playing Jeopardy, and one where the reputations of the designers are on the line, there will be enormous pressure to tailor the system to succeeding at that challenge by any means whatsoever, including kludges that are specific to the rather peculiar requirements of the game of Jeopardy.

Pinker went on:

The real problem is that we may never know. It will depend on whether the I.B.M. team divulges the methods in technical publications or keeps them as trade secrets. In the golden years of A.I. (1960s and 1970s), there was a lot of back-and-forth between academia and industry. Labs at Xerox, I.B.M., B.B. & N., and A.T. & T. were among the best research departments in the world, and people and ideas flowed in and out of them. Then A.T. & T. lost the free money from its telephone monopoly, and the other companies realized that their openness was just helping their competitors (e.g., the Macintosh GUI, which was basically stolen from Xerox PARC), and they forced their scientists to work on applied projects and kept the details out of the public domain. The result is that A.I. has become disengaged from cognitive science, the old A.I./philosophy gurus like Minsky, Papert, Simon, and Schank have not been replaced, and questions like yours may be impossible to answer, if I.B.M., as seems likely, will keep the specs secret. That is, we won’t be able to know how much of the program’s success to attribute to humanlike or superhuman intelligence, and how much to Jeopardy-specific hacks.

I.B.M. spent, by some reports, more than a billion dollars to build Watson. The project has been a brilliant branding campaign, but are there business applications that would allow I.B.M. to recoup its investment? Watson is not going to be the next Google. Watson can understand nuances of language and syntax, unlike Google. But Google, though commercial and cluttered, is far more in tune with what humans want (including sex) than Watson is.

In some ways, Watson is a throwback to I.B.M.’s beginnings in computing: a large, stand-alone mainframe that can be programmed for specific tasks. There is talk of a “Watson M.D.”: a remote terminal that will be installed in doctors’ offices and can help to diagnose patients’ illnesses and prevent future ones. There’s also discussion of a Watson-enabled device for your car that could identify what’s causing that rattle more accurately than an unfamiliar mechanic or the hosts of “Car Talk.” Darren Hayes, a professor of computer science at Pace University who specializes in computer forensics, told me that he foresees applications for Watson in intelligence-gathering, specifically in improving the quality of analysis at the seventy-five “fusion centers” that the Department of Homeland Security set up around the country after 9/11.

I do hope Watson finds something useful to do, and does not become, like so many other instant TV celebrities, future fodder for a “Where are they now?” segment. Otherwise, I.B.M. just bought three very expensive half-hour infomercials.