Science Fiction movies and TV shows have often foretold that a time would come when human creations in the form of computers, robots, or androids would become so intelligent and logical that they would decide the earth was better off without humans. IBM’s latest creation, called Watson, may very well be the next evolutionary step toward the inevitable annihilation of humanity.All jokes aside, this week’s Jeopardy features Watson, an artificial intelligence that can understand natural language, pitted against the top Jeopardy champions. IBM believes Watson can defeat any human at Jeopardy and prove just how unnecessary we all are. In Round One, however, humanity at least proved to be an equal match with human competitor Brad Ruttner tying it for first place.
Moreover, Watson is no basement PC. It is a cluster of 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers, all running Linux, with 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores operating at 80 teraflops. This all gives it the ability to process 80 trillion operations per second, just enough to tie with a human in Round One. To that end, we humans should pat ourselves on the back. With smartphones that can instantly perform calculations, it still took a room filled with servers to beat our best on Jeopardy. The next rounds will air tonight (February 15) and February 16.
The point of Watson is to create an intelligent research system that can help people in industries such as law, business, and medicine. Unlike “Ask Jeeves”, which just pretended to understand natural language, Watson can actually do it. Think of Watson as an artificially-created academic librarian, albeit an emotionless one.
The Jeopardy contestants face off against Watson’s avatar rather than the real thing. At this point the avatar looks a bit like a computer screen with an icon and flashing “thought rays”, but it will probably not take long for developers to turn it into a hot, gun-carrying woman in a tight jumpsuit. The latter half of those Sci-Fi films almost inevitably involves humans fighting off the machines until the bitter end. If the end is anything like the first round of Jeopardy, machines and their creators may both be doomed.
Feature image, courtesy: IBM.
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