Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

by Martin Ford

As an IBM document describing the Watson technology points out: “We have noses that run, and feet that smell. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, but a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? How can a house burn up as it burns down? Why do we fill in a form by filling it out?”15 A Jeopardy! computer would have to successfully navigate routine language ambiguities of that type while also exhibiting a level of general understanding far beyond what you’d typically find in computer algorithms designed to delve into mountains of text and retrieve relevant answers. As an example, consider the clue “Sink it & you’ve scratched.” That clue was presented in a show televised in July 2000 and appeared on the top row of the game board—meaning that it was considered to be very easy. Try searching for that phrase using Google, and you’ll get page after page of links to web pages about removing scratches from stainless-steel kitchen sinks. (That’s assuming you exclude the exact match on a website about past Jeopardy! matches.) The correct response—“What is the cue ball?”—completely eludes Google’s keyword-based search algorithm.