NOSSO FUTURO AUTOMATIZADO

Há  muitos relatos da gênese de Watson. O mais popular, que não é necessariamente o mais exato - e este é o tipo de problema pelo qual Watson muitas vezes tropeçou - começa em 2004, em uma churrascaria perto de Poughkeepsie. 
Uma noite, um executivo da IBM chamado Charles Lickel estava jantando lá quando ele percebeu que as mesas em torno dele tinham de repente esvaziado. 
 Pouco tempo depois, Lickel participou de uma sessão de brainstorming, na qual os participantes foram convidados a apresentar o próximo "grande desafio" da IBM. A empresa, ele sugeriu, deveria assumir Jennings.

One evening, an I.B.M. executive named Charles Lickel was having dinner there when he noticed that the tables around him had suddenly emptied out. Instead of finishing their sirloins, his fellow-diners had rushed to the bar to watch “Jeopardy!” This was deep into Ken Jennings’s seventy-four-game winning streak, and the crowd around the TV was rapt. Not long afterward, Lickel attended a brainstorming session in which participants were asked to come up with I.B.M.’s next “grand challenge.” The firm, he suggested, should take on Jennings.

I.B.M. had already fulfilled a similar “grand challenge” seven years earlier, with Deep Blue. The machine had bested Garry Kasparov, then the reigning world chess champion, in a six-game match. To most people, beating Kasparov at chess would seem a far more impressive feat than coming up with “Famous First Names,” say, or “State Birds.” But chess is a game of strictly defined rules. The open-endedness of “Jeopardy!”—indeed, its very goofiness—made it, for a machine, much more daunting.

Lickel’s idea was batted around, rejected, and finally resurrected. In 2006, the task of building an automated “Jeopardy!” champion was assigned to a team working on question-answering technology, or QA. As Stephen Baker recounts in his book about the project, “Final Jeopardy,” progress was, at first, slow. Consider the following (actual) “Jeopardy!” clue: “In 1984, his grandson succeeded his daughter to become his country’s Prime Minister.” A person can quickly grasp that the clue points to the patriarch of a political family and, with luck, summon up “Who is Nehru?” For a computer, the sentence is a quagmire. Is what’s being sought a name? If so, is it the name of the grandson, the daughter, or the Prime Minister? Or is the question about geography or history?

Watson—basically a collection of processing cores—could be loaded with whole Wikipedias’ worth of information. But just to begin to search this enormous database Watson had to run through dozens of complicated algorithms, which his programmers referred to as his “parsing and semantic analysis suite.” This process yielded hundreds of “hypotheses” that could then be investigated.

After a year, many problems with Watson had been solved, but not the essential one. The computer took hours to generate answers that Jennings could find in an instant.

A year turned into two and then three. Watson’s hardware was upgraded. Benefitting from algorithms that allowed him to learn from his own mistakes, he became more proficient at parsing questions and judging the quality of potential answers. In 2009, I.B.M. began to test the machine against former, sub-Jennings “Jeopardy!” contestants. Watson defeated some, lost to others, and occasionally embarrassed his creators. In one round, in response to a question about nineteenth-century British literature, the computer proposed the eighties pop duo Pet Shop Boys when the answer was Oliver Twist. In another round, under the category “Just Say No,” Watson offered “What is fuck?” when the right response was “What is nein?”

I.B.M.’s aspirations for Watson went way beyond game shows. A computer that could cope with the messiness and the complexity of English could transform the tech world; one that could improve his own performance in the process could upend nearly everything else. Firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon were competing with I.B.M. to dominate the era of intelligent machines, and they continue to do so. For the companies involved, hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake, and the same could also be said for the rest of us. What business will want to hire a messy, complex carbon-based life form when a software tweak can get the job done just as well?

Ken Jennings, who might be described as the first person to be rendered redundant by Watson, couldn’t resist a dig at his rival when the two finally, as it were, faced off. In January, 2011, Jennings and another former champion, Brad Rutter, played a two-game match against the computer, which was filmed in a single day. Heading into the final “Final Jeopardy!,” the humans were so far behind that, for all intents and purposes, they were finished. All three contestants arrived at the correct response to the clue, which featured an obscure work of geography that inspired a nineteenth-century novelist. Beneath his answer—“Who is Bram Stoker?”—Jennings added a message: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”