Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so
If you were interested in the subject at all, you’ve probably read all about it already. But for what it’s worth, I updated my “What Is Hubris, Alex?” post of a couple days ago with three longish comments recapping the three nights’ programs.
The first one is here; scroll down on that page for the others.
I’d heard of this little demonstration of computing power some time ago; last week I caught a documentary about it on PBS’s NOVA program. On the way into work today, I also heard a more up-to-date report of it on NPR’s Morning Edition. The event itself takes place tonight through Wednesday, during the regular Jeopardy! broadcast time slot.
One of my favorite moments in the NOVA program: The Watson project leader at IBM, David Ferrucci, was for a while quite discouraged with Watson’s performance in dry runs. He’d invited his two small children to the set to watch one of these earlier tests. Onstage, Watson’s screen was set up as in the above video, between two human competitors. The part of the “host” was played by a comedian. Every time Watson got a question wrong (which happened many times during that stretch), the host laughed and made a wisecrack. Because, y’know, the wrong answers were often surreally wrong. People in the audience and Watson’s competitors always laughed at the host’s commentary.
What did Ferrucci’s kids take away from the experience?
Not that they’d witnessed something important, an historic event.
Not that machines aren’t as “smart” as humans, nor even as “smart” as their advocates claim.
To my knowledge, they didn’t remember — all kid-like — something completely irrelevant like the vending machines.
No, what they got was emotional confusion:
Why was that man picking on Watson, Daddy? Why was he making fun of him? And why was everyone else laughing and applauding with the man? Didn’t that hurt Watson’s feelings?
The highway of electronics history is, as they say, littered with the road-kill of assertions that thus-and-such task will never be successfully performed by a computer. So I lay no bets on the outcome of this Jeopardy! challenge.
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* Note that this can refer to human hubris, either on the part of Watson’s designers and builders, or — to the contrary — on the part of everyone who thinks this will validate the conventional wisdom: that a computer cannot out-“think” a human on any task requiring natural-language processing.
More interesting, maybe, to wonder: Will it someday refer to machine hubris?
