Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [49]
But at the heart of the decision-making process was a paradox: A company built on scientific analysis was running a global branding campaign from intuition. Before launching any new product, IBM had the means and expertise to carry out sophisticated tests analyzing public reaction. The research division had an entire social media unit, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that specialized in new methods of tracking consumer sentiments through the shifting words and memes cascading across the Internet and sites like Twitter and Facebook. IBM’s consultants around the world were helping other companies tie these studies to their businesses. Yet when it came to creating the face, voice, and personality of its own game-playing computer, the IBM team relied on instincts—a vague sense they had of consumers’ interests and fears. IBM and Ogilvy ran the campaign in a way that Watson could never compute: from the gut.
This isn’t to say that statistical analysis would have pointed IBM toward an ideal form and personality for Watson. People’s attitudes about computers, and what they should express, were complicated, and they varied—by generation, geography, and gender. Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor and author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, studies the relations between humans and their machines. In one experiment, people played blackjack against a computer. The computer was represented by a photograph of a person along with a cartoon-like bubble for text. In one scenario, the computer expressed interest only in itself—“I’m happy, I won.” In another, it empathized only with its opponent, and in a third, it expressed feelings for both itself and its opponent. The humans in the test certainly didn’t like the self-centered computer. But the males in the test group preferred it when the computer showed interest only in them, while females favored the balanced approach.
One lesson from this and other studies, according to Nass, is that people quickly develop feelings, from admiration to resentment, for the machines they encounter. And this was sure to be the case for millions when they saw Watson playing Jeopardy on their television. He argued that people would feel more positively toward a computer that expressed feelings to match its performance. “That computer had better have some emotion,” he said. “It should sound stressed if it’s not doing well.” If it didn’t express emotions, he said, it would seem alien and perhaps menacing. “When it sits there and it’s not clear what it wants, we think, ‘What the hell is going on?’” he said. “The scariest movies are when you don’t know what something wants.”
In IBM’s defense, even if the company had wanted to provide Watson with a rich and modulated human voice, it would have required a large development effort to build it. Existing voice technology came close to expressing human emotion but was still a bit off. The IBM team worried that people would resent, or fear, a computer that tried to mimic the emotional range of the human voice and fell short. To save money and reduce that risk, they adapted a friendly bionic voice they already had on a shelf. This Watson would remain relentlessly upbeat through the ups and downs of its Jeopardy career.
Not that the avatar wouldn’t be expressive in its own way. Working in his Long Island studio, Joshua Davis was devising schemes to represent Watson’s cognitive processes. He worked with forty-two threads of color that would stream and swarm across Watson’s round avatar according to what was going on in its “mind.” It would look a bit like the glass globes at science museums, where each touch of a human hand summons jagged ribbons of lightning. Davis, a sci-fi buff, picked the number forty-two as an homage to Douglas Adams’s