I know I joke around a lot about some pretty inane shit sometimes, but something has come to my attention that is too serious to take lightly in any way. I was listening to NPR today, and they had an interview with a fellow from IBM who was discussing a recent project the company has been developing: a robot engineered for the sole purpose of competing on Jeopardy!
Now I have no problems with robots that build cars, defuse bombs, play musical instruments, or dance like an eighty year-old in a pool of jello...hell, I'm that that turned off by the whole "rise of the machines" thing that the Terminator and Matrix flicks warn us about, but for the love of all that is holy...not Jeopardy!
This trivia-bot will be programmed with a cubic fuck-ton of information, and then given a search protocol that determines the best answer based on the context. For example, a category in which all answers begin with the letter "I" may not be obvious at first, after a couple of questions, it will figure out the trick and find the answer. In other words, this monstrosity of science will be like those asshole contestants who wait for the cheap answers to be snatched up and then run the rest of the category like a douchebag. Our only hope is that they don't give this thing a movable arm that it can use to write its response for Final Jeopardy.
Apparently Dick-3PO will be ready to square off against a human opponent in a year. Humanity has only one hope to take this metallic beast down. Sit back down, John Conner. Go back to not being relevant or cool anymore, Neo; neither of you punks have the trivia balls to take this thing on. Two words: Ken Jennings. 74 consecutive Jeopardy! victories; $3,022,700 in accumulated prize money. He is our Kasparov, and I'll be goddamned if he is going to let the Trivia-Tron 2000 cornhole him the same way Garry got it from Deep Blue. Besides, he's Mormon, so he's already half-robot to begin with.
The mechanical menace has to be stopped, both for my sake, and for humanity's...but mostly for mine. I'm not about to let some encyclopedic erector set rob me of my chance to make it onto that show. I have tried out three different times for Jeopardy!, and been shot down every time time by the cold bitchslap of chance. I will not not join the ever-growing line of auto-workers, novelty muscians, and bomb-defusing monkeys and sit by while robots take over my niche in society. More importantly, if I never get onto Jeopardy, I'll never get to play "Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots" with Trebek's throat.
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1 comment:
That is the funniest thing I've read in the past month.
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