IBM’s Watson beats Jeopardy’s human champions
IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, won Jeopardy in 2011 against two of its highest-ranking players of the time. It was a real-time showcase of how “human smart” computers could be during a period when it was one of the most advanced AI systems on Earth.
According to Wired, researchers had scanned about 200 million content pages into IBM’s Watson, including books, movie scripts, and encyclopedias. The system could browse through nearly 2 million pages of content in three seconds, which is why it seemed prime to compete against humans in a game that tested general knowledge.
Watson soon became problematic, which is what happens when you feed AI a bunch of information and don’t account for it. Watson had access to the user-submitted Urban Dictionary, which in turn made it into a “hot mess.” A few years later, it started recommending cancer treatments deemed “unsafe and incorrect,” which became exemplary of what happens when you feed the algorithm the wrong information.
