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1. Who received the first phone call placed by Alexander Graham Bell?
2. Who is the fictional British Army doctor and veteran of the Afghan war who became Sherlock Holmes’s trusted sidekick?
3. Who, along with Francis Crick, codiscovered the double helix structure of DNA?
4. Which computer is named after the founding president of International Business Machines?
I love TV quiz shows.
One of my guilty pleasures is sitting in front of the television and watching Cash Cab. And I don’t just watch, I participate with all the enthusiasm of a sports fan offering vicarious advice to his favourite team.
However, unlike Hockey Night in Canada couch-coaching, quiz show voyeurism carries with it a certain element of personal risk; it is something of a blow to one’s ego to be shown up by those know-it-all elementary kids on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? And then there is the issue of collateral embarrassment: on one occasion, I apparently humiliated my teenage daughter in front of her friends by suddenly leaping up and shouting at the television, “It’s a monotreme!” in response to a question about platypuses (platypodes? platypi?). Then again, virtually everything I do humiliates my daughter in some way or another.
So it was with considerable interest that I watched the appearance of Watson on Jeopardy!, the granddaddy of all TV quiz shows. If you missed Watson’s debut, you need to know that Watson is a machine, or as IBM helpfully explains:
Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and the IBM DeepQA software to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds. Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. The POWER7 processor’s massively parallel processing capability is an ideal match for Watson’s IBM DeepQA software, which is embarrassingly parallel (that is a workload that executes multiple threads in parallel).
Watson took on and promptly wiped the floor with two human Jeopardy champions, posing answers, always framed in the form of a question, in a soft synthetic voice eerily reminiscent of HAL 9000. I have to admit that I experienced a bit of schadenfreude on behalf of humanity when Watson indicated that he—or should I say it—thought Toronto was an American city with two airports named after war heroes.
Human beings have been replacing themselves with machines for a long time now. In American folklore, the mighty John Henry died in a heroic but ultimately futile contest with a steam hammer, and the word computer was originally used to describe a person, usually female, who made her living calculating by hand answers to mathematical problems before the word was applied to the devices designed for that purpose. But the notion that a machine might be “smart” enough to respond using natural language to questions posed in natural language is particularly disconcerting. After all, in our efforts to define what makes us human, our innate ability to use complex language to communicate abstract ideas ranks highly.
The challenge facing educators now is how to respond to Watson and its successors yet to come. Watson’s arrival on the scene reminds us that we must focus on developing in students those higher order skills and competencies that remain beyond the reach of the machines, including the novel application of knowledge, and the ability to collaboratively solve problems, do critical analysis, be creative, synthesize, use considered judgement and make good decisions. It should be the explicit goal of every teacher in every lesson to provide an opportunity for students to practise at least one of these very human skills.
As for Watson, IBM is apparently looking for new applications for its wonder machine. Perhaps we could put it to work bubbling in the answers to PAT and diploma examination questions while we go on to more important things.
(By the way, the answer to all the above questions is “Watson.” Watson would probably have known that.)
I welcome your comments—contact me at dennis.theobald@ata.ab.ca.
