Step two: Judgment Day

Last night I drove up to WeHo to hang out with Aubrey and Will for Valentine’s day. As soon as I arrived, I was hurried into the apartment so we could watch the end of Jeopardy: the IBM challenge, where an IBM computer with an AI program (See the Wiki article here), played against the Jeopardy champion who had won the most money ever, and the champion with the longest winning streak. It was simultaneously amazing and TERRIFYING. The computer has a voice, and answers questions like it’s a person. GAAAAAAAAAAH! Seriously if this was a movie, a static-y clip from this Jeopardy series (it’s a three-day tournament) would be the opening scene, and the next scene would feature humanity in a dusty wasteland hiding/running from the machines who have decided we need to be destroyed, or something. Yayyyy....

I was seriously sad every time Watson (that’s it’s name) would get an answer wrong, because the color on Watson’s screen would kind of dim and get “sad”. It reminded me of GERTY’s faces in Moon:


But don’t be fooled--it’s just how it makes us feel sorry for them so we don’t prepare for the coming apocalypse.

And IBM has been up to this since the 90s, when it created a computer (called Deep Blue) that was able to beat Garry Kasparov, the reigning chess world champion. So if we do end up as slaves to the machine overlords, at least we’ll know who to blame.