Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all
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0:00 - 0:03In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary
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0:03 - 0:07of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set.
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0:07 - 0:09I mean, nine years is a long time.
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0:09 - 0:11And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics,
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0:11 - 0:12I think what that means
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0:12 - 0:16is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead.
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0:16 - 0:18(Laughter)
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0:18 - 0:19But not all, a few are still alive.
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0:19 - 0:22Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever.
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0:22 - 0:24And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all.
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0:24 - 0:27I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me.
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0:27 - 0:29For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as,
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0:29 - 0:32as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff.
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0:32 - 0:35And I can't complain about this.
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0:35 - 0:37I feel like that was always sort of my destiny,
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0:37 - 0:41although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet.
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0:41 - 0:43If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager,
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0:43 - 0:46it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name.
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0:46 - 0:48(Laughter)
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0:48 - 0:52And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years.
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0:52 - 0:55But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there.
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0:55 - 0:58I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad
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0:58 - 1:01with whatever great fact I had just read about --
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1:01 - 1:03Haley's comet or giant squids
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1:03 - 1:07or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was.
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1:07 - 1:10I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same.
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1:10 - 1:14And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work.
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1:14 - 1:16(Laughter)
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1:16 - 1:18And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows.
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1:18 - 1:22I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979
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1:22 - 1:24because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school,
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1:24 - 1:28that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud."
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1:28 - 1:32I was going to miss my game shows.
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1:32 - 1:34And later, in the mid-'80s,
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1:34 - 1:35when "Jeopardy" came back on the air,
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1:35 - 1:39I remember running home from school every day to watch the show.
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1:39 - 1:45It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house.
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1:45 - 1:47And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working,
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1:47 - 1:50where there was only one English language TV channel.
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1:50 - 1:51There was Armed Forces TV,
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1:51 - 1:53and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching.
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1:53 - 1:56So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy."
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1:56 - 1:59I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid.
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1:59 - 2:05I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s
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2:05 - 2:07and holding my own, back when that was a fad.
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2:07 - 2:09There's a weird sense of mastery you get
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2:09 - 2:13when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know.
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2:13 - 2:16You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know.
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2:16 - 2:19And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power --
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2:19 - 2:26the right fact deployed at exactly the right place.
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2:26 - 2:28I never had a guidance counselor
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2:28 - 2:31who thought this was a legitimate career path,
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2:31 - 2:33that thought you could major in trivia
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2:33 - 2:36or be a professional ex-game show contestant.
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2:36 - 2:39And so I sold out way too young.
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2:39 - 2:40I didn't try to figure out what one does with that.
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2:40 - 2:43I studied computers because I heard that was the thing,
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2:43 - 2:45and I became a computer programmer --
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2:45 - 2:46not an especially good one,
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2:46 - 2:51not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on "Jeopardy" in 2004.
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2:51 - 2:53But that's what I was doing.
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2:53 - 2:56And it made it doubly ironic -- my computer background --
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2:56 - 3:00a few years later, I think 2009 or so,
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3:00 - 3:02when I got another phone call from "Jeopardy" saying,
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3:02 - 3:05"It's early days yet, but IBM tells us
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3:05 - 3:10they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.'
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3:10 - 3:11Are you up for this?"
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3:11 - 3:13This was the first I'd heard of it.
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3:13 - 3:16And of course I said yes, for several reasons.
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3:16 - 3:18One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time.
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3:18 - 3:21It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on.
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3:21 - 3:23(Laughter)
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3:23 - 3:25And I would do it for nothing.
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3:25 - 3:27I don't think they know that, luckily,
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3:27 - 3:30but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons.
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3:30 - 3:32I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have.
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3:32 - 3:36And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future.
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3:36 - 3:38People playing computers on game shows
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3:38 - 3:41was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future,
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3:41 - 3:43and now I could be on the stage with it.
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3:43 - 3:44I was not going to say no.
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3:44 - 3:45The third reason I said yes
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3:45 - 3:47is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win.
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3:47 - 3:50I had taken some artificial intelligence classes.
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3:50 - 3:54I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on "Jeopardy."
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3:54 - 3:57People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program
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3:57 - 4:01that can read a "Jeopardy" clue in a natural language like English
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4:01 - 4:04and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings,
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4:04 - 4:07unpack the meaning of the clue.
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4:07 - 4:11The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do,
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4:11 - 4:14very hard for a computer.
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4:14 - 4:17And I thought, well this is going to be child's play.
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4:17 - 4:22Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species.
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4:22 - 4:24(Laughter)
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4:24 - 4:25But as the years went on,
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4:25 - 4:29as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this,
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4:29 - 4:31I started to get occasional updates from them,
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4:31 - 4:33and I started to get a little more worried.
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4:33 - 4:39I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph.
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4:39 - 4:43It was a scatter chart showing performance on "Jeopardy,"
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4:43 - 4:47tens of thousands of dots representing "Jeopardy" champions up at the top
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4:47 - 4:49with their performance plotted on number of --
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4:49 - 4:53I was going to say questions answered, but answers questioned, I guess,
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4:53 - 4:55clues responded to --
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4:55 - 4:57versus the accuracy of those answers.
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4:57 - 5:01So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to.
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5:01 - 5:02And at first, it was very low.
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5:02 - 5:06There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena.
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5:06 - 5:08But then you see the line start to go up.
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5:08 - 5:10And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud.
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5:10 - 5:12And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart
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5:12 - 5:18some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color.
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5:18 - 5:20And thought, what are these?
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5:20 - 5:24"The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings."
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5:24 - 5:26And I saw this line coming for me.
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5:26 - 5:27And I realized, this is it.
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5:27 - 5:29This is what it looks like when the future comes for you.
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5:29 - 5:31(Laughter)
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5:31 - 5:33It's not the Terminator's gun sight;
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5:33 - 5:37it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do,
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5:37 - 5:40the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at.
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5:40 - 5:45And when the game eventually happened about a year later,
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5:45 - 5:48it was very different than the "Jeopardy" games I'd been used to.
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5:48 - 5:51We were not playing in L.A. on the regular "Jeopardy" set.
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5:51 - 5:53Watson does not travel.
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5:53 - 5:54Watson's actually huge.
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5:54 - 5:58It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory,
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5:58 - 6:00trillions of bytes of memory.
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6:00 - 6:02We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room.
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6:02 - 6:06The only other "Jeopardy" contestant to this day I've ever been inside.
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6:06 - 6:09And so Watson does not travel.
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6:09 - 6:13You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage.
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6:13 - 6:15So me and the other human player
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6:15 - 6:19wound up at this secret IBM research lab
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6:19 - 6:21in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County
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6:21 - 6:23to play the computer.
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6:23 - 6:25And we realized right away
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6:25 - 6:28that the computer had a big home court advantage.
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6:28 - 6:30There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage.
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6:30 - 6:33Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls,
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6:33 - 6:35and there's the thing in the middle of their court.
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6:35 - 6:38And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers
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6:38 - 6:40cheering on their little darling,
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6:40 - 6:42having poured millions of dollars into this
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6:42 - 6:45hoping against hope that the humans screw up,
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6:45 - 6:47and holding up "Go Watson" signs
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6:47 - 6:52and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right.
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6:52 - 6:58I think guys had "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their bellies in grease paint.
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6:58 - 7:03If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their gut,
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7:03 - 7:05it's an unpleasant sight.
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7:05 - 7:08But they were right. They were exactly right.
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7:08 - 7:10I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR,
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7:10 - 7:13but Watson won handily.
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7:13 - 7:16And I remember standing there behind the podium
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7:16 - 7:19as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking.
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7:19 - 7:22It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer.
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7:22 - 7:26And you could hear that little tick, tick, tick, tick.
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7:26 - 7:29And I remember thinking, this is it.
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7:29 - 7:31I felt obsolete.
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7:31 - 7:34I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s
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7:34 - 7:37seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line.
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7:37 - 7:42I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete
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7:42 - 7:46under this new regime of thinking computers.
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7:46 - 7:48And it hasn't been the last.
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7:48 - 7:50If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally --
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7:50 - 7:52and I see this all the time --
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7:52 - 7:57that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically
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7:57 - 7:59without actually needing a human pharmacist.
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7:59 - 8:01And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals
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8:01 - 8:06because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions.
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8:06 - 8:08You don't need human assistants for that anymore.
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8:08 - 8:11I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score
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8:11 - 8:13from a baseball or football game
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8:13 - 8:16and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game
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8:16 - 8:17and was commenting on it.
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8:17 - 8:21And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job
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8:21 - 8:23as the humans they're replacing,
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8:23 - 8:26but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper.
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8:26 - 8:31So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be.
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8:31 - 8:35I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies,
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8:35 - 8:37we'll enter a new golden age of leisure
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8:37 - 8:39when we'll all have time for the things we really love
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8:39 - 8:46because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren.
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8:46 - 8:48I've heard other people say quite the opposite,
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8:48 - 8:50that this is yet another tier of the middle class
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8:50 - 8:55that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology
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8:55 - 8:57and that this is actually something ominous,
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8:57 - 8:58something that we should worry about.
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8:58 - 9:00I'm not an economist myself.
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9:00 - 9:03All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work.
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9:03 - 9:06And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible.
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9:06 - 9:09Here's the one thing that I was ever good at,
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9:09 - 9:13and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people
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9:13 - 9:15and thousands of processors working in parallel
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9:15 - 9:17and they could do the same thing.
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9:17 - 9:21They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV,
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9:21 - 9:23and "I'm sorry, Ken. We don't need you anymore."
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9:23 - 9:27And it made me think, what does this mean,
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9:27 - 9:29if we're going to be able to start outsourcing,
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9:29 - 9:32not just lower unimportant brain functions.
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9:32 - 9:35I'm sure many of you remember a distant time
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9:35 - 9:38when we had to know phone numbers, when we knew our friends' phone numbers.
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9:38 - 9:40And suddenly there was a machine that did that,
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9:40 - 9:42and now we don't need to remember that anymore.
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9:42 - 9:44I have read that there's now actually evidence
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9:44 - 9:48that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships,
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9:48 - 9:50physically shrinks and atrophies
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9:50 - 9:53in people who use tools like GPS,
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9:53 - 9:55because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore.
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9:55 - 9:58We're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard.
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9:58 - 10:00And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff
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10:00 - 10:02gets smaller and dumber.
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10:02 - 10:06And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better
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10:06 - 10:09at knowing and remembering stuff than we are?
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10:09 - 10:13Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that?
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10:13 - 10:17Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less?
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10:17 - 10:21As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know,
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10:21 - 10:28this was a terrifying idea to me.
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10:28 - 10:33The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important.
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10:33 - 10:35The things we know are still important.
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10:35 - 10:38I came to believe there were two advantages
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10:38 - 10:42that those of us who have these things in our head have
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10:42 - 10:47over somebody who says, "Oh, yeah. I can Google that. Hold on a second."
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10:47 - 10:50There's an advantage of volume, and there's an advantage of time.
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10:50 - 10:51The advantage of volume, first,
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10:51 - 10:54just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays.
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10:54 - 10:55There's so much information out there.
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10:55 - 10:56Being a Renaissance man or woman,
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10:56 - 10:59that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance.
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10:59 - 11:00Now it's really not possible
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11:00 - 11:03to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor.
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11:03 - 11:05There's just too much.
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11:05 - 11:07They say that the scope of human information
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11:07 - 11:09is now doubling every 18 months or so,
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11:09 - 11:12the sum total of human information.
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11:12 - 11:15That means between now and late 2014,
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11:15 - 11:19we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes,
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11:19 - 11:23as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together.
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11:23 - 11:25It's doubling every 18 months now.
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11:25 - 11:28This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make
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11:28 - 11:31require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts.
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11:31 - 11:36A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in?
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11:36 - 11:38Who do I vote for?
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11:38 - 11:40Do I take this job or that one?
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11:40 - 11:43These are the decisions that require correct judgments
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11:43 - 11:45about many different kinds of facts.
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11:45 - 11:47If we have those facts at our mental fingertips,
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11:47 - 11:50we're going to be able to make informed decisions.
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11:50 - 11:53If, on the other hand, we need to look them all up,
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11:53 - 11:54we may be in trouble.
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11:54 - 11:56According to a National Geographic survey I just saw,
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11:56 - 11:59somewhere along the lines of 80 percent
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11:59 - 12:03of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy
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12:03 - 12:06cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map.
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12:06 - 12:08If you can't do that first step,
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12:08 - 12:11are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know
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12:11 - 12:14to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy?
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12:14 - 12:15Quite probably not.
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12:15 - 12:17At some point you're just going to be like,
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12:17 - 12:19"You know what? There's too much to know. Screw it."
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12:19 - 12:20And you'll make a less informed decision.
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12:20 - 12:24The other issue is the advantage of time that you have
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12:24 - 12:26if you have all these things at your fingertips.
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12:26 - 12:29I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith.
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12:29 - 12:32She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England
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12:32 - 12:35on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand.
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12:35 - 12:37She runs up to them on the beach one morning
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12:37 - 12:40and says, "Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach."
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12:40 - 12:42And they say, "What do you mean? We just got here."
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12:42 - 12:45And she said, "In Mr. Kearney's geography class last month,
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12:45 - 12:48he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea
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12:48 - 12:50and you see the waves churning way out there,
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12:50 - 12:54that's the sign of a tsunami, and you need to clear the beach."
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12:54 - 12:56What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this?
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12:56 - 12:58Her parents thought about it,
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12:58 - 13:00and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her.
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13:00 - 13:02They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel,
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13:02 - 13:06and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily,
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13:06 - 13:09because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami,
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13:09 - 13:10the day after Christmas, 2004,
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13:10 - 13:14that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean.
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13:14 - 13:17But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach,
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13:17 - 13:22because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before.
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13:22 - 13:24Now when facts come in handy like that --
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13:24 - 13:27I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact,
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13:27 - 13:32one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time --
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13:32 - 13:34normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life.
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13:34 - 13:37But in this case it happened in real life.
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13:37 - 13:38And it happens in real life all the time.
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13:38 - 13:40It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation.
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13:40 - 13:45It's a meeting or job interview or first date
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13:45 - 13:47or some relationship that gets lubricated
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13:47 - 13:50because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge.
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13:50 - 13:53You say where you're from, and I say, "Oh, yeah."
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13:53 - 13:54Or your alma mater or your job,
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13:54 - 13:56and I know just a little something about it,
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13:56 - 13:58enough to get the ball rolling.
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13:58 - 14:00People love that shared connection that gets created
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14:00 - 14:02when somebody knows something about you.
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14:02 - 14:06It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met.
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14:06 - 14:07That's often the advantage of time.
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14:07 - 14:09And it's not effective if you say, "Well, hold on.
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14:09 - 14:14You're from Fargo, North Dakota. Let me see what comes up.
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14:14 - 14:16Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo."
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14:16 - 14:19That doesn't work. That's just annoying.
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14:19 - 14:22(Laughter)
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14:22 - 14:28The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson,
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14:28 - 14:34Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it."
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14:34 - 14:38And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that.
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14:38 - 14:44I have always believed that the things we know -- that knowledge is an absolute good,
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14:44 - 14:47that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads
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14:47 - 14:49are what make us who we are,
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14:49 - 14:51as individuals and as a species.
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14:51 - 14:55I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete.
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14:55 - 14:59I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced
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14:59 - 15:01by these little bubbles of specialty,
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15:01 - 15:04so that none of us know about the common associations
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15:04 - 15:07that used to bind our civilization together.
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15:07 - 15:09I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all
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15:09 - 15:10sitting on a mountain somewhere,
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15:10 - 15:14reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of "Simpsons" episodes
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15:14 - 15:18and the lyrics of Abba songs.
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15:18 - 15:23I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share
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15:23 - 15:26and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices,
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15:26 - 15:28to our search engines and our smartphones.
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15:28 - 15:33In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think,
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15:33 - 15:36things don't always end well.
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15:36 - 15:39Those movies are never about beautiful utopias.
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15:39 - 15:45It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in "2001."
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15:45 - 15:48Things always go terribly wrong.
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15:48 - 15:50And I feel like we're sort of at the point now
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15:50 - 15:54where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in.
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15:54 - 15:56This is a question of leadership,
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15:56 - 16:00because it becomes a question of who leads the future.
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16:00 - 16:06On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age
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16:06 - 16:09where information is more universally available
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16:09 - 16:11than it's ever been in human history,
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16:11 - 16:13where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips.
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16:13 - 16:15And on the other hand,
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16:15 - 16:17we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia
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16:17 - 16:19where the machines have taken over
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16:19 - 16:22and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore,
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16:22 - 16:25that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud,
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16:25 - 16:31and why would we ever bother learning anything new.
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16:31 - 16:35Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in.
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16:35 - 16:37And we can all make that choice.
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16:37 - 16:41We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn,
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16:41 - 16:44who don't just say, "Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over,
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16:44 - 16:45I don't have to learn anymore,"
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16:45 - 16:48or "Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime.
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16:48 - 16:50I don't have to learn new things anymore."
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16:50 - 16:54No, every day we should be striving to learn something new.
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16:54 - 16:58We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us.
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16:58 - 17:01That's where the people you see on "Jeopardy" come from.
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17:01 - 17:04These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants
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17:04 - 17:06sitting at home memorizing the phone book.
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17:06 - 17:07I've met a lot of them.
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17:07 - 17:09For the most part, they are just normal folks
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17:09 - 17:13who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything,
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17:13 - 17:16thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject.
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17:16 - 17:19We can live in one of these two worlds.
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17:19 - 17:22We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know,
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17:22 - 17:24continue to be the thing that makes us special,
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17:24 - 17:30or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson.
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17:30 - 17:33Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours.
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17:33 - 17:35Thank you very much.
- Title:
- Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all
- Speaker:
- Ken Jennings
- Description:
-
Trivia whiz Ken Jennings has made a career as a keeper of facts; he holds the longest winning streak in history on the U.S. game show Jeopardy. But in 2011, he played a challenge match against supercomputer Watson -- and lost. With humor and humility, Jennings tells us how it felt to have a computer literally beat him at his own game, and also makes the case for good old-fashioned human knowledge. (Filmed at TEDxSeattleU.)
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 17:52
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all | ||
Thu-Huong Ha approved English subtitles for Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all | ||
Morton Bast accepted English subtitles for Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all | ||
Timothy Covell added a translation |