Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [47]
In talking to Jeopardy executives, though, it quickly became clear that they’d have to think smaller. If IBM’s Watson passed muster, it would be a guest on the show. It would not take it over. Its branding space, like that of any other contestant, would be limited to the face behind the podium—or whatever fit there. Jeopardy held the power and exercised it. If IBM’s computer was to benefit from an appearance on Jeopardy, the quiz show would lay down the rules.
Now that Watson was reduced from a possible Jumbotron to a human-sized space, what sort of creature would occupy it? “Would it look like a human?” asked Miles Gilbert, the art director. “Would it be an actual human? Was there a single person who could represent IBM?” At one point, he said, they considered establishing Watson as a child, one that learns and grows through an educational process. That didn’t make sense, though, because Watson would already be an adult by the time it showed up on TV. (And Jeopardy apparently wasn’t going to give IBM airtime to describe the education of young Watson.) The Ogilvy team also considered other types of figures. A new Pixar movie that year featured Wall-E, a lovable robot. Perhaps that was the right path for Watson.
Whether it was a cartoon figure or a bot like Wall-E, much of the discussion boiled down to how human Watson should be. The marketers feared that millions of viewers might find it unsettling if the computer looked or acted too much like a real person. Science fiction was full of evil “human” computers. HAL, the mutinous machine running the spaceship in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was the archetype. It killed four of the five astronauts on board. The last one had to remove the machine’s cognitive components one by one to save his own life. “We didn’t need this project and Watson to scare people about technology,” said Syken. “If you go to our YouTube channel and see the comments, you’ll see people talking about 2001 again and again, and IBM tracking people.” He had a point. In one short IBM video about technology in neonatal care, someone with the username Present10s commented: “This is creepy. Reminds me of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ Also a multinational taking over human bodies.”
Another thorny issue for IBM was jobs. Big Blue, perhaps as much as any company, was known for replacing people with machines. That was the nature of technology. In the 1940s, IBM turned its attention to the world’s industrial supply chains, the enormously complex processes that wound their way from the loading docks of iron mines to the shiny bumpers in a Cadillac showroom, from cattle herds in Kansas to the vendor selling hot dogs in Yankee Stadium. Each of these chains wound its way through depots, rolling mills, slaughterhouses, and packaging plants, providing jobs at every step. But these processes had evolved willy-nilly over the years and weren’t efficient. By building mathematical models of the supply chains, IBM could help companies cut out waste and duplication, speeding them up and slashing costs. This process, known as optimization, often eliminated jobs. The engine of optimization, and its symbol, was a big blue IBM mainframe computer.
In the following decades, computers continued to replace people, supplanting bank tellers, toll collectors, and night watchmen. Steel mills as big as cathedrals, which once crawled with workers, operated with skeleton crews, most of them just monitoring the computerized machinery. Robots moved on to automobile assembly lines. Good arguments could be made, of course, that inefficient companies faced extinction in a competitive global economy. In that sense, optimization and automation saved jobs. And in a healthy economy, workers would migrate toward more productive sectors, even if the transition was often painful. The quickly growing tech industry itself employed millions. For many, though, textbook economics and