Left Brain, Right Brain

The hoary distinction between the analytical and artist halves of our brain is having a field day.

Superfast computers seem to be challenging the very essence of humanity, brushing aside the classic debate about personalities and which kind you might be. The question has morphed into can a machine think? Does it have art?

The recent debut of Watson, IBM's game-show machine, has aroused a flurry of attention. Reading the Times closely, as I have been since January, gives us a stand-in for the larger debate out there.

On the one side, you have a cheerleading reporter like John Markoff, reveling in the triumph of Watson over a couple of human Jeopardy champions. Note that Watson doesn't play any television game show, but only Jeopardy. That's an important point. Markoff had another piece a few days ago in an intermittent series called Smarter Than You Think, this one about software that searches law cases, and therefore eliminates billable hours by law firms (sounds implausible, eh?). In both cases, he claims that the machine's accomplishment has something to do with human language understanding -- as in the movies, from HAL on through to the malevolent Skynet in the Terminator movies.

On the other side, you have philosophical objections like those from Stanley Fish, in the Opinionator, and his reinforcements, Sean Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus wrote a famous critique of artificial intelligence 40 years ago, in which he argued that machines executing programs don't do what people do. These two supply some critical insights into artificial intelligence when they allude to the facts that machines do not have motivations, and that machines don't joke. Read Watson Still Can't Think to see how they put it.

The Times editors betray something of a bias here. While Watson's victories occasioned big coverage, there's no hint on the front of the digital Times of the existence of a short item in the Bits Column that a human has beaten Watson at Jeopardy. It was even a politician who did the trick, and a Democrat at that, Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey. Of course, in former lives, Holt was also a physicist at Princeton, but really more to the point, he was an actual Jeopardy winner -- five times in the 70s.

I say good for Holt, but he's a special case. My favorite Jeopardy player is the character played by Rosie Perez in the movie White Men Can't Jump. She plays the vodka swilling girlfriend of a two-bit basketball hustler, who spends her days memorizing the Almanac because Jeopardy is her "destiny."

Imagine your conversation with her, and then try to imagine a conversation with Watson. Play by Watson's rules: you always go first, and give the machine turned around Q&A's. Think Watson will figure out what's on your mind?