Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [48]
And IBM was producing ever more sophisticated models. Researchers in the company labs in Yorktown, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, were applying many of the lessons learned in the industrial world to the modern workplace. With a computerized workforce, like IBM’s own, each employee left an electronic record of clicks, updates, e-mails, and jobs completed. Researchers could analyze individual workers—their skills, the jobs they did, the effectiveness of their teams. The goal was to fine-tune the workforce. “We evaluate every job,” said Samer Takriti, who headed a study of company workers at IBM Research until 2007, “and we calculate whether it could be handled more efficiently offshore or by a machine.”
Given this type of analysis, it wasn’t hard to imagine that millions of television viewers might regard a question-answering computer as a fearsome competitor rather than a technological marvel. What’s more, as the IBM team discussed these issues in the fall of 2008, the global economy seemed to be collapsing. Watson’s turn on Jeopardy might well take place during a period of growing joblessness and economic fear. It could be the next Great Depression. In such a climate, they decided, a humanoid Watson might frighten people. In response, they moved to focus the publicity campaign less on the machine than on the team that built it. “This had to be a story about people,” said Syken.
When it came to Watson’s avatar, IBM and Ogilvy chose to avoid anything that might make it look human, opting for abstraction. The outlines of this avatar, as it turned out, were already taking shape in another division of the company. For a year, IBM’s global strategy team had been developing a campaign to communicate Big Blue’s technologies, and its mission, in a simple slogan. In a company with four hundred thousand people and hundreds of business lines, this was no easy task. What they settled on was data. In the modern economy, nearly every machine received instructions from the computer chips inside it. Many were already linked to networks, and others soon would be. These machines produced ever-growing rivers of digital data that detailed, minute by minute, the operations taking place across the planet. Many of these processes, such as bus routes, hospital deliveries, the patterns of traffic lights, had simply evolved over time, like the old industrial supply chains. They seemed to work. But given the data and much more that was en route, mathematically savvy analysts were able to revamp haphazard systems, saving time and energy. Science would replace intuition. The electrical grids, infused with new information technology, would grow smarter, predicting demand—house by house, business by business—and providing just the right amount of current to each user. Traffic patterns would be organized to reduce congestion and pollution. So would garbage collection, the delivery of health care and clean water, and the shuttling of farm goods to the cities. These intelligent systems were IBM’s niche. Technology would lead to what the company called a Smarter Planet.
Two days after the election of Barack Obama as president, on November 6, 2008, IBM´s chairman, Sam Palmisano, appeared before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City to unveil the Smarter Planet initiative. He framed it in the context of the global economic crisis, saying that the world would adopt these approaches “because we must.” He said that carrying on with the status quo, running business and government the traditional twentieth-century way, had led to the economic and environmental crises and was “not smart enough to be sustainable.” Illustrating his talk was an icon of the planet Earth with five bars radiating from it. This was Chubby Planet, and the bars represented intelligence.
Chubby Planet soon became the basis of Watson’s avatar. It made sense. Chubby was abstract. It represented intelligence. And it fit into IBM’s global branding effort. In one form or another,