Hello I Must Be Going, Watson

By John McDonnell

Okay, so IBM’s Watson computer can win at “Jeopardy”. Can it understand a Groucho Marx joke?

The news came out in mid-February that Watson, a computer built by IBM, beat two former champions at the game of “Jeopardy”. Beat them soundly, too.

I thought it was amusing when IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in the 1990s, because I thought it was nothing more than a parlor trick. It’s just raw computing power, I told myself. Computers will never be more than glorified adding machines. 

However, Watson has me worried. That's because this computer was specially built to do "natural language processing", which meant it had to analyze “Jeopardy” questions by sifting through a vast database of knowledge (encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, etc.) in microseconds, make hundreds of decisions in the blink of an eye, and then come up with what it decided was the correct answer.

I can accept that computers can do math a million times better than me. I'm not threatened by that at all. But when they start coming onto my turf, which is words and their meanings, then I get a little nervous. I'm a writer, and I have been one all my life. I've always had a certain skill at putting words together, and it's served me well both in school and in my profession.

I know that over the course of the last 30 years computers have proven to be better at humans in many things, and they have made major changes in industries and professions because of that.

But words? I thought I was safe from computer penetration of my field, simply because computers couldn't understand the nuances of words the way humans can. A human expression like, "It's raining cats and dogs," can completely flummox a computer, because the machines are so literal. Or, how about a Groucho Marx joke like, “I wanted to get a boat with a flat bottom, but the girl at the boathouse didn’t have one.” How can a computer understand the joke in that line?

For the “Jeopardy” challenge, IBM had to find a way to enable Watson to analyze expressions, decide between different meanings of a word, and take all sorts of gray areas into account that you don't have with a mathematics problem. Apparently, they succeeded. IBM announced that it is entering into a partnership with Nuance, a company that makes speech recognition software, to adapt its technology for commercial use in the near future.

What does this mean for my profession? One thing I can see is that it won't be long before writers will have the kind of software that musicians use to correct imperfections in a vocal performance. In other words, your word processing program will have a way to convert a clunky turn of phrase into something more clear, with more style and grace. The software will analyze a pedestrian turn of phrase and offer options for making it better. "Perhaps this metaphor will work better," it might say. "Here is a quote from Shakespeare that will express your point better." Or, "this section should be shorter; these words should be eliminated."

Not long after that I can see a program that will write articles, books, yes even fiction and poetry, and all you have to do is type in a few keywords. As the technology gets more sophisticated, you could have computers producing great literature just as now they make breakthroughs in the fields of mathematics and science.

And then what? Will there be a time when people prefer computer writers over human ones? If a computer can write a best-selling detective novel or romance for a publisher, and the publisher doesn't have to pay royalties or deal with eccentric writers, I think publishers will jump at that arrangement. Why not?

And then guys like me will be among the millions of writers who have been replaced by a computer. They'll be hawking their wares on street corners, trying to get somebody to buy their novels or poems even though people will have programs on their laptops that can produce better writing for free, and in a matter of minutes.

There’s an expression that everyone thinks they have a novel in them. What will happen to them when the Watsons of the world can do it better? Will they become bitter? Will they destroy their computers? Will they form underground cults and seek to overthrow the computer companies and send us back to the Dark Ages when people still wrote literature?

It's not fair, I tell you. Somebody better stop this before it gets serious.

THE END