Last week, Ken Jennings, the player with the longest winning streak on Jeopardy, and Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy, played two exhibition matches against IBM’s artificial intelligence program Watson). If you haven’t seen the episodes yet, Watson won. Ken Jennings has written an interesting take on the experience:
Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of “thinking” machines. IBM has bragged to the media that Watson’s question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek. The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson. Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of “thinking” machines. “Quiz show contestant” may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.
You can watch parts of the episodes on Jeopardy.com.