Thursday, February 17, 2011

It Won't Be Back

For the past three nights, a super computer name "Watson" had been competing on Jeopardy against two of the game's most successful former contestants. Not surprisingly, the computer was kicked ass. This lead to a few million people jumping to jokes about computers becoming self-aware like in Terminator and a rise of machines that will soon take over the planet. However, watching a clip of the show later revealed it wasn't that the computer was so much smarter than the two humans, just faster on the clicker. So basically, computers only know as much information as the people in charge of programming decide to share with them, but they are more than happy to spit that information back at us quickly and act like they are smarter than us. They're kind of like first-year Philosophy majors that way.

Oh, and it should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: don't listen to this clip at work.

No comments: