Carbon-based Life Forms Over Computers for 100, Alex

Someone will have to explain it to me, because I’m not sure what Watson beating two humans on Jeopardy! proves, except that a supercomputer can store more information and retrieve it faster than a human brain, and I didn’t think there was any doubt left about that.

The fact that Watson gave Dorothy Parker as the answer (presumably in the form of a question) to a question (in the form of an answer) the right answer to which was The Elements of Style, interchanging an author with a book, that is, a human with a thing, suggests that Watson wasn’t thinking its way through the game, at least not in a human way.

It worked its way through using the If this then that process of elimination formula that’s been the basis of computer “thought” since the original Watson was still running IBM.

I know I’m missing something.

By the way, did Watson respond Who was Dorothy Parker? or What is Dorothy Parker?

Seems to me that this is a story because of what might have happened.  The humans might have beaten the computer.  This is the story that was being set up to be told.

And that story would have taught us what?

That at least one human could get at his store of trivia more quickly and efficiently than a computer?

Not exactly.

Humans don’t answer questions simply by accessing information stored in their brains.

They answer them by tapping into memories that may be stored anywhere in their bodies.

If I had been competing against Watson I’d have gotten the Elements of Style question immediately.  I’d have known the answer in my bones.

The bones of my hands.

I own the book.  I’ve held it in my hands.  I’ve read it through a dozen times.  I’ve assigned it to students.   The book’s existence isn’t just a fact to me, it’s a part of my physical experience.  It’s a part of me.

But not only have I read The Elements of Style, I have read just about everything else E.B. White wrote, Charlotte's Web, Trumpet of the Swan, Stuart Little, his essays, his Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker, Is Sex Necessary?, which White wrote with his friend James Thurber, another of my favorite writers most of whose work I have read and some of which I adapted for a play I produced and directed in college.

That last fact matters because of two things.

One, when I read a lot of White’s stuff I knew who he was apart from his being the writer of the particular piece I was reading.

Two, reading E.B. White reminds me of reading James Thurber and reading James Thurber reminds me of putting on the play and remembering that play always makes me picture the actress who played the unicorn in The Unicorn in the Garden and the very dainty and well-mannered way she plucked and ate a flower and remembering her might and probably has made think of The Elements of Style.

The Elements of Style isn’t just a book to me, it’s a piece of a real person’s biography and that real person’s biography is a piece of my autobiography.

This makes it something other than a stored fact in my memory and gives me many different ways of accessing it and recalling it that a computer can’t begin to even imitate.

All of those books, essays, and bits of occasional writing might have been “read” into Watson, but Watson would not have the memories of having read them and fallen in love with them.  They would not be part of Watson’s life, because, well, Watson, isn’t alive, of course.  But I mean that I read those books while doing other things with, in, along with, and only through my body.  They have a living presence in my memory because I lived my way through reading them.

I was a kid on vacation on Cape Cod when I read The Trumpet of the Swan.  I was a young aspiring writer looking forward to going off to college in Boston when I read the essays for the first time.  I was the father of two small boys sitting on the floor of a bedroom full of toys when I read Stuart Little out loud.

My memories of reading White’s work are tied in with my memories of the circumstances under which I read his work so that I can’t think of Trumpet of the Swan without also thinking of the ocean and walking up the hill from the house where my family was staying to the bookstore where my father bought us the book which ties Trumpet of the Swan to another book, The Hobbit, because my father read us that one on another vacation at another house on Cape Cod, this one in a room with a big picture window that looked out on the Bay and across it to Provincetown.

And I can’t think of Stuart Little without also picturing the play rug printed with race cars and roadways on the floor of the boys’ room in our house in Syracuse.

And I can’t read “Death of a Pig” or any of White's essays without also remembering how happy I was when I got to college and it turned out that the teacher of my first writing class there had put Essays of E.B. White on the reading list, one of only three books, the other two being Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion, which means that my memories of White’s essays are connected to Didion’s essays too, as well as to the whole of my first year in Boston, which is when I met the blonde, which ties them to…well, the whole rest of my life.

This is why I say The Elements of Style is a part of me.  But, as I part of me, I can “remember” it if called upon in ways that Watson cannot.  I don’t have to run through my store of information, go through processes of comparison and elimination, and plug it into a formulaic answer as the one that fits, although I can do that sort of “thinking.”

I can get at it immediately and reflexively through countless associations that, isolated, would appear to have no connection to a little blue book on style and usage.

A drawing by James Thurber, a glimpse of the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown lit up at night, a walk down a street in New York City , a Hot Wheels car turning up at the bottom of a box while I’m looking for something else, the touch of the blonde’s hand, laughing at Hugh Laurie as House getting off a wisecrack full of a very non-E.B. White-esque cynicism---Laurie played the father in the movie adaptation of Stuart Little.

None of this makes me “smarter” than Watson.  It certainly doesn’t mean that I could have beaten it on Jeopardy!  It doesn’t even mean that I would have been more likely to get that question right.  Watson’s train of “thought” was apparently on the right track.  There’s a connection between Dorothy Parker and the The Elements of Style.  Both Parker and E.B. White made their marks writing for The New Yorker.  Watson stopped too soon in its search through its store of information that must include cross-references between American authors and their published works.

Somewhere in Watson’s programming is a line of code with a bug that caused it to fail to distinguish between a book and a writer which I’m sure Watson’s human overlords have fixed already.

But I can make associations of a sort Watson can’t.  I can feel my to the correct answer by touching things along the way that have no connection to each other except that once upon a time I experienced them in ways that connected them.

It’s still a metaphor to say that a computer like Watson has a brain.  But such a brain as it has is very different from yours and my brains in that our brains are part of a body and travels with it through space and time and gathers all its information through that body.  We don’t store information that we acquire.  We sense it.

We touch it, smell it, taste it, see it, feel it. 

And in that way it becomes literally, physically part of us.

I have something Watson doesn’t have.

A body.

And that body gives me something else Watson doesn’t have.

I have a me.

Having at that me doesn’t make it more likely that I would have answered the question correctly than Watson could have.

It makes it more likely that I would have than another human being, somebody’s else’s me, might have, even somebody else’s me who was smarter and quicker-witted than my me.

The fact that we acquire information as part of our experiencing the world---as part of our being alive and living lives---means that some information is going to mean more to us than other information we have stored.  It will feel more important.

Computers, unless instructed to, do not privilege any pieces of store information.  Every thing they “know” is of the same importance to them, which is, really, of no importance.  A piece of information will become important relatively---relative to its usefulness in completing a given task, like answering a question on Jeopardy!

But because of when and under what circumstances I read E.B. White’s work, The Elements of Style isn’t just one of the thousand books I’ve read.  It’s tied to my first year in Boston and that privileges it among my terabytes of stored information in a way I’ll bet it’s not privileged among yours even if you think highly of it as a manual of style.

In fact, there are probably not too many people besides me who think of it is a sexy book.

You would have had to have it associated in your memories with other memories, such as coming back to your apartment late at night after working at a movie theater in downtown Boston and finding waiting up for you in your bed a pretty girl wearing nothing but one of your t-shirts.

Sexied that book up for you right there, though, didn’t I?

Wouldn’t have meant a thing to Watson to have that information added to its memory.

The Elements of Style is tied up with my personal history of love, work, and family.  It’s part of what gave me the me I have, the me that is definitely not you, no matter how much stored information we have in common, the sort of me Watson does not have.

If one of the human contestants had been able to beat Watson on Jeopardy!, the story the media would have told would have been John Henry’s, although probably without a heart bursting at the end, “Human beats machine.”

But that wouldn’t have been the real story.

The real story would have been:

A particular human being---that is, a specific me---was able to access memories and make associations that, as useful as they were in helping him win on Jeopardy!, mainly and most importantly revealed him to be the me that he is.

That is, the real story, would have been the biography of the human winner.

_____________________

Until a computer travels about through space and time in a “body” that “feels” the world, it won’t have a “me” like any me that we know.

Writers of speculative fiction can speculate about what sort of me it would have and when and how it would become undeniably a me.

At the moment, all I’m concerned with is that on Jeopardy! Watson did not demonstrate that it was even close to having a me.

But Ken Jennings did.

At the Atlantic, Ben Zimmer, the On Language columnist for the New York Times, makes the case that the real story---or one of the real stories---lies in the Simpsons reference Jennings attached to his Final Jeopardy answer:

“I, for one, welcome our new computer overloads.”

Of course, most everybody has latched onto that, enjoying it for its own sake but also as a kind of a moral victory of human being over computer.

Computers can’t get a joke.

Watson could and maybe did recognize the reference, could and maybe did note that Jennings intended it as a joke.  But Waston couldn’t feel the joke because Watson can’t feel anything.  Watson is still a thing, from our point of view---and even if we weren’t the only ones to have a point of view we would still privilege it over Watson’s or another thing’s point of view---to be human is better than being a thing.

Being a me is a victory in itself.

In channeling Kent Brockman, Jennings wasn’t just demonstrating that he’s a me in the way Watson can’t be, he was reminding all the humans watching of the particular and peculiar me-s they are.

But, says Zimmer, there’s a somewhat more objective truth at work here.

The difference between Watson and us me-s isn’t just that we have bodies and Watson doesn’t.  It’s also that we process the information those bodies take in as sensations into language.

Zimmer quotes one of Watson’s chief engineers arguing that Watson “understands” language to a degree no other computer before it could.  But Zimmer thinks Jennings has proved it ain’t so, at least for now:

But what would Watson make of this smart-alecky remark? The question-answering algorithms that IBM developed to allow Watson to compete on Jeopardy! might lead it to conjecture that it has something to do with The Simpsons -- since the full text of Wikipedia is among its 15 terabytes of reference data, and the Kent Brockman page explains the Overlord Meme. After all, Watson's mechanical thumb had beaten Ken and Brad's real ones to the buzzer on a Simpsons clue earlier in the game (identifying the show as the home of Itchy and Scratchy). But beyond its Simpsonian pedigree, this complex use of language would be entirely opaque to Watson. Humans, on the other hand, have no problem identifying how such a snowclone works, appreciating its humorous resonances, and constructing new variations on the theme.

All of this is to say that while Ken and Brad lost the battle, Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon.

Read all of Zimmer’s post, Is It Time to Welcome Our New Computer Overlords?

Comments

[Jennifer]

In fact, there are probably not too many people besides me who think of it is a sexy book.

The same goes for me Goodfellas... to me, it's a romantic, sexy movie. It's not, but to me, that's where it resides in my memory.

[new visitor]

Just read (confession: skimmed through) your blog post for first time. And wish I'd more time this evening for reading/commenting, but was struck by your writing about humans vs computers answering questions, that seemed to have a corollary in the film Slumdog Millionaire, where no one could believe an uneducated 'slumdog' could answer all the questions. Perhaps it was an exaggerated fairy-tale, but I think the film was a testimony to the fact that poor, 'uneducated' people are greatly educated in ways that conventionally educated people couldn't understand, and that 'crumbs' of knowledge and feeling can be nurturing where people bloated by exposure books, films, intertubes, etc. would just ignore them.

[actor212]

Lance, the point behind the Watson experiment is a demonstration of "soft logic".

In other words, Watson was able to discern literate nuances from the "answers" that weren't direct facts, and to phrase an appropriate response in a given framework.

Practical applications? IBM is working with Dragon (voicerecognition) software to develop a version of Watson for hospitals that would take the place of a physician's assistant in collating information, including a patient interview, for a doctor to assess and diagnose.

Scary. huh.

[Rana]

I always find it a bit amusing when, in one of these human-versus-computer contests, success by the machine is seen as a "victory" over human beings. I find it amusing because it's really a story of collective human ingenuity versus individual human abilities; computers are, after all, the products of human beings, and as such, any triumph they might "enjoy" is therefore a human one.

[minstrel hussain boy]

as a former jeopardy winner (1 whole game! which puts me in the upper third of players) the biggest, and inevitably insurmountable edge that watson held was the timing of the buzzer.

when i have been asked for advice by people about to play on the show, i have told them to forget about study, hone the buzzer skills. my second game came down to the final 2K question, where i knew the answer (the flying dutchman), but got beaten on the buzzer and the other guy won by 200, bet it all on the final jeopardy answer, got it right (jefferson davis) and lost by a buck.

sic semper minstrels.

the programming challenges were daunting.

e.b. white rules. (i got the "elements of style" question too)

[PurpleGirl]

I didn't watch the human vs Watson shows. What a friend told me (who did watch them) was that Watson really won because it could hit the buzzer faster that it had an answer. (Said friend is a retired IBM researcher.)

[Tom M]

minstrel has it! as the father of a college jeopardy 3rd place finisher that was precisely her point right after the games. The guy who won, a senior at CMU, was quicker and spent most of his down time between shows practicing his button skills.
She was happy, though; so was I, it paid for grad school.

[minstrel hussain boy]

tell her that another jeopardy player said "way to go girl" tom.

the game is a pressure cooker (and i know from pressure, i've been a performer most of my adult life). like music though, it is absorbing enough that i was able to burrow my concentration deep into the game (i never even looked at the tote boards, i didn't know how close that last game had been until it was over).

i absolutely encourage everybody i talk with to go through the audition process. there is really nothing to lose and a tremendous upside. i ended up walking away with 30K and two friends from my group of contestants.

i was consistently amazed at how a concentration of very smart, highly competitive people could get along so well. i attribute most of it to the efforts of the staff and their intense focus on making sure that the rules are followed and the game is fair.

in a fair game, there is no shame in getting beaten. play hard, play fair and you have fun.