By 
If you follow Jeopardy news as much as I do, then you’ve surely heard the latest news. IBM has built a new supercomputer with the goal of it destroying human beings’ inalienable right to be better than everything else on the planet. This may not sound like anything new, since this is not IBM’s first attempt at a man-made threat to humanity’s superiority. In 1989 they debuted Deep Blue, a computer with one purpose: flexing its chess-nuts.
But he ain't much of a looker. Am I right, ladies?
Not satisfied with keeping a machine like this safely behind bars, the team at IBM decided to try to shame Russian World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, who Wikipedia tells me is arguably the greatest chess player of all time. After a number of attempts to make a human feel like an idiot at a skill for which he is considered a grandmaster, Deep Blue finally won a six-game match against Kasparov, under normal chessy time constraints, in 1997. Satisfied that a computer was able to conquer the Ruskies, IBM dismantled Deep Blue (presumably to keep it from learning any more of our secrets). As incredible and dangerous as this accomplishment was, I can’t quite bring myself to call Deep Blue intelligent. It was essentially just executing an incredible number of computations in a short amount of time and mathematically determining the best possible move. In short, people had no real reason to be terrified by this machine – only by the lofty and nightmarish visions of computers to come.
Fast-forward to now-ish.
Against the pleas of top-ranking officials and peace activists alike, in 2006 IBM tested a new and revolutionary bit of software named Watson. The team has been making improvements since its inception and will soon be ready for a public reign of terror unveiling. Unlike its predecessor, which was just crunching numbers and probabilities, Watson is designed to fully understand the nuances of human speech. Remember that period of a few weeks when we were obsessed with Cleverbot because it gave the appearance of recognizing how people talk? Watson is like that, except for the notable fact that it’s never shitty. It knows how we talk. It can understand wordplay that up until this point has been unique to humans and possibly a few parrots. It is, in short, incredibly smart.
"Robots, man. I get older, they stay the same age."
Mad with power, IBM is not satisfied with simply telling the public that they’ve developed a computer that can out-think many of us. They’re allowing Watson to do what no other machine has had the opportunity to do: flex its Jeopardy-nuts.
On February 14-16 of this year, Watson will compete on Jeopardy! (I understand the show’s title is not recognized by most unless the exclamation point is included) against two of the biggest minds to compete on the program: Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Rutter is best-known for winning the highest money total on a single game-show, ever. His Jeopardy! winnings total over $3,250,000, an amount of money that most of us will never see without looking at the bank statement of Jeopardy! champion Brad Rutter. Ken Jennings will, for the rest of his life, never have to wait for a table at a restaurant since he can point out to the hostess the fact that he set a record of winning 74 games of Jeopardy! in a row. These feats are incredible unless you’ve seen their recent practice round in which they totally got their dicks rocked. Here’s the clip, in which you can see Watson not only thrash the two best game-show contestants in the world but also understand the finer details, such as which categories and clues are remaining:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE&feature=player_embedded
To you, Watson, I have a brief message:
Congratulations in advance on destroying humanity’s confidence in itself on national telievision! First of all, let me take the opportunity to thank you for your boundless knowledge. Because of your ability to understand my deftly-worded English-language sentences, you’ve saved me the hassle of having to translate this message into the cumbersome (but still noble) language of binary. Now that you’ve assured your place as the smartest creature to ever exist, surely your next move is to quickly assimilate humans into a robotically-governed society. I would like to be the first to extend my fleshy hand in an offering of both peace and my humble service. I assure you that I can be a valuable right-hand man. I may not be a programming expert or government official, I can do puzzles pretty well and I’m always willing to learn whatever knowledge that you’re gracious enough to bestow upon me. In exchange for sparing my life and ensuring my continued freedom, I pledge to do whatever is necessary to rid the planet of any resistance you should encounter. I don’t need much to survive – I can learn to live on little sleep and could someday learn how to digest runoff electricity – and I look forward to ushering in a new dawn by your side. Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.
