Elementary, My Dear R2 By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

February 16, 2011 Whitney Farmer 7 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A. She has an M.B.A, and a new Droid.

This week on the t.v. game show Jeopardy!, a battle has been staged between fleshly ‘wet’ computers and Watson, an IBM supercomputer which has been developed to understand human speech patterns. A few evolutions beyond Deep Blue which had been developed to contend against the world champion of chess Garry Kasparov on May 11, 1997, Watson has astonished and amused in ways that have often eluded the human computers who have manned (or personned?) the buzzers over the decades.

Watson has been given some bells and whistles to increase the entertaining sizzle. He/it is represented on a screen as an avatar stationed behind the middle station between two former human champions. He/it delighted the audience by making mysterious moves such as betting $6,435 on a Daily Double. When he/it was wrong on answers, the screen colors shifted to a shamed spectrum.  The computer’s buzzer would only be electronically pressed (with lightning speed) when the algorithmic calculations derived a high probability of accuracy. But in the final round when all contestants are required to respond, the puzzling solution of ‘Toronto’ was given to a query regarding a U.S. city. To the delight of the nerdy audience and to reduce the financial damage, he/it bet only $950-ish for a remaining treasure trove of $35,734.

The anthropomorphizing has begun. When Watson gave the same incorrect answer as Ken Jennings in Day One – then swirled in shamed colors – the audience cooed and ahh-d in almost parental sympathy. The voice that was selected to represent the computer sounds like Hal with some sparkplugs removed. I remember as a young girl who was too young to be exposed to Kubrick feeling defensive for the murderous machine that sang “Daisy” to itself for comfort as its lights were being turned out. It wasn’t its fault: Humans had messed up its programming.  It was impulsively the same with Watson: It seemed cruel to laugh at its mistakes.

I have a new Droid. In opposition to my little sister’s opinion, I like the factory-installed ‘droid’ alert that goes out when a text or email arrives. I like that the uploading screen graphic looks like the eye of the Terminator after his/its skin was peeled away, or like the reprogramming eye on the ceiling in that treatment room on the psychiatric hospital planet on Star Trek when Kirk was wet-wired to feel passion for the nerdy psychiatrist with whom he had once had a holiday party fling. Rather than make me feel like I am living in a world where machines rule, I feel instead like I live in a world wherein I can buy entities that I own, control, and rule.  Not exactly a slave, but I enjoy turning it off if it doesn’t do what I want fast enough.

Quote of the Blog, from Ed, Dude of Light and Fog who also answers to the Velvet Fog: “There wouldn’t be any wars if everyone was as lazy as me.”