“Your Toaster Will End Up Killing You”

Rest assured ‘Watson’ is not the beginning of the take-over of the planet by machines.

NTUSU Tribune
Opinions - March 2010

In early February a supercomputer by the name of ‘Watson’ beat the best human ‘Jeopardy!’ players at their own game. The next day headlines read something to the tune of, “IBM’s Watson Supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy”. “Watson will flip out one day and your toaster will end up killing you”, was a comment posted on ‘Youtube’ by “heliosc7” in response to this historic event. Apparently, the ‘Matrix’ age is almost upon us and we must decide whether we should pick the blue or the red pill when given the choice.

Honestly, it was the funniest thing I had come across this year. A supercomputer the size of ten refrigerators with a 15TB Random Access Memory, or RAM, and a 5GB/s processing capability does not mark the beginning of planetary colonization by machines. In fact, if anything, it is the logical progression of the Information Age. With the sheer volume of information in existence, it is impossible for a human being to acquire comprehensive and in-depth knowledge in the few decades that he or she has on planet Earth. We need a machine capable of processing all the information out there on a particular subject and supplying it when need be. ‘Watson’ could very well be a revolution in the making in that regard.

Getting back to the matter at hand, there are a few reasons why there is no need for alarm on the machine-rule front. Firstly, ‘Watson’ is a supercomputer and not a form of artificial intelligence. Consciousness and life are mysteries we haven’t solved yet. We cannot explain why putting the right molecules in the right sequence equals life. Until we get to the root of the “magic” that is consciousness we can hardly replicate it artificially.

The other major reason why we shouldn’t stay up at night looking out for machine captors is that we are not even close to artificially replicating the sheer complexity that is us. ‘Watson’ is the size of ten refrigerators and can do only part of what we humans, less than the size of one refrigerator, have the capability to do. Watson processes information and provides answers.  We can do that too. And we can walk, dance, love and dream of and build ‘Watson’. Added to that is the fact that ‘Watson’ isn’t always right; on ‘Jeopardy!’ it was beaten to the buzzer and also gave incorrect answers.

I think what ‘Watson’ should be is a source of excitement. Human language in all its complexity can be “understood” by a computer. That is a great achievement. As Dr. Paul Bloom, a researcher at IBM, beautifully and aptly said, “Life is really about questions and answers. Watson can now help us get some of those answers,”

Unfortunately, or fortunately, this means that the following prediction is more likely to come to a theatre near you than a page one headline emblazoned on a newspaper near you: “The system goes on-line August 4^th 2011. Human decisions are removed from strategic defence. Watson begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time August 29^th.” (comment by “frozenphil” on ‘Youtube’.)