According to classic American folklore, John Henry was the strongest man alive, born with a hammer in his hand. When he and his fellow 19th century rail workers' jobs were threatened by the advent of the steam-powered hammer, a product of the Industrial Revolution, Henry challenged the new mechanical marvel to a contest. As the story goes, Henry outperformed the steam-powered hammer and saved the jobs of his colleagues only to succumb to exhaustion and death, resulting in his immortalization as a champion of working-class people everywhere.
In the years between John Henry's time and ours, technology has come a long way. Where the triumph of man against machine was once seen as something to take pride in, we now strive for the best and quickest gadgets, capable of feats no human could ever hope to achieve. Instead of fearing the impending dominance of computers in realms once reserved for humans, we embrace it. For decades, computers have been faster than us when it comes to calculation and processing, but we may now be approaching an age in which computers are capable of mirroring the social graces and linguistic intricacies of mankind.
The artificial intelligence known as "Watson" was developed by IBM as a major step toward that goal. Designed to answer questions posed in natural language, Watson recently was pitted against humans on the TV game show Jeopardy! in what was meant to be a display of the remarkable advances made in the field of artificial intelligence. To the casual viewer, however, it really just became a contest of who could press a button the fastest. With all due respect to John Henry, we've known that machines were better than us at that sort of task for more than 100 years.
The Jeopardy! special, which spanned three days, featured previous champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter playing alongside Watson. Two full games were completed, and the action was intercut with background about Watson, as well as some overdramatic PR about how much of an advance this was in the field of artificial intelligence. Watson leapt out to an early lead in the two-game showcase and never looked back, winning in commanding fashion. The fundamental flaw in this exhibition of spongy human flesh versus cold, logical hardware was that it was painfully clear that Watson wasn't more "intelligent" than his opponents, but simply quicker to buzz in his responses.
You could see the growing frustration on the faces of Jennings and Rutter when Watson beat them to the buzz time and time again. Despite being quick on the draw and usually correct in its answers, Watson made some decidedly unintelligent errors as well. Errors such as repeating the same wrong answer given seconds earlier by a fellow contestant or somehow deciding that Toronto was a U.S. city stuck out like a sore thumb on any Turing test trying to measure how human Watson's behaviors were.
I don't mean to belittle the accomplishments made by the researchers at IBM. Watson's capabilities could prove very beneficial to people in numerous fields in ways that haven't been considered yet, but in terms of being an actual "artificial intelligence" in the more colloquial sense of the term, Watson has a long way to go. In the same way that a cardboard cutout could be a great approximation of a person until you take a step to the side, Watson is exceptionally humanlike in some ways but equally inhuman in others. While it may have been the product of a brilliant and inspired team of programmers and engineers at IBM, Watson's world debut on Jeopardy! made for some particularly uninspired television.
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