Words&Dirt

“‘I really have no desire to write reviews of other people’s books. Modern publications upon magic are the most pernicious things in the world, full of misinformation and wrong opinions.’

‘Then sir, you may say so. The ruder you are, the more the editors will be delighted.’

‘But it is my own opinions I wish to make better known, not other people’s.’

‘Ah, but, sir,’ said Lascelles, ‘it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people’s work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions betters. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one’s own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one’s theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.’”

––Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, pg. 141-2

“When asked if Watson can think, David Ferrucci, IBM’s chief scientist in charge of Watson, paraphrased Dutch computer scientist Edger Dijkstra: ‘Can a submarine swim?’

That is, a submarine doesn’t ‘swim’ as a fish swims, but it gets around in the water faster than most fish, and can stay down longer than any mammal. In fact, a sub swims better than fish or mammals in some ways precisely because it does not swim like a fish or a mammal––it has different strengths and weaknesses. Watson’s intelligence is impressive, albeit narrow, because it is not like a human’s. On average it’s a heck of a lot faster. And it can do things only computers can do, like answer Jeopardy! questions 24/7 as long as required, and port itself to an assembly line of new Watson architectures when the need arises to seamlessly share knowledge and programming. As for whether or not Watson thinks, I vote that we trust our perceptions.

To Ken Jennings, one of Watson’s human Jeopardy! opponents (who dubbed himself ‘the Great Carbon-Based Hope’), Watson felt like a human competitor.

The computer’s techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson’s case, a fifteen-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously check the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels ‘sure’ enough, it decides to buzz. This is all in an instant, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.

Is Watson really thinking? And how much does it really understand? I’m not sure. But I am sure Watson is the first species in a brand new ecosystem––the first machine to make us wonder if it understands.”

––Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, by James Barrat, pg. 223-4