Spoilers for last night’s finale of the Jeopardy IBM Challenge coming up:
Well, Homo sapiens, it was a great run. Two hundred thousand years! Yes, there was a war here and there and we caused a few extinctions and whatnot. But we developed language and mathematics, left crap on the ground that can be seen from space, and kicked the hell out of Homo neanderthalensis. Hold your heads high!
Humans’ primacy over the game of Jeopardy, at least, ended last night, as IBM’s Watson answered a Final Jeopardy question that put it on top with $77,147 to Ken Jennings’ $24,000 and Brad Rutter’s $21,600. Watson accepted victory stoically, as Jennings congratulated him on his answer board: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” See, there’s no computer that can craft a witty Simpsons reference! Probably because IBM hasn’t bothered to invent one yet.
So, fine, a computer outplayed us at Jeopardy. But there’s one thing humans can do better, and that’s point fingers. Or in this case, thumbs.
