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In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary

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of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set.

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I mean, nine years is a long time.

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And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics,

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I think what that means

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is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead.

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(Laughter)

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But not all, a few are still alive.

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Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever.

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And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all.

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I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me.

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For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as,

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as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff.

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And I can't complain about this.

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I feel like that was always sort of my destiny,

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although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet.

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If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager,

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it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name.

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(Laughter)

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And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years.

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But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there.

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I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad

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with whatever great fact I had just read about --

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Haley's comet or giant squids

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or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was.

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I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same.

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And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work.

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(Laughter)

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And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows.

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I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979

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because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school,

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that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud."

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I was going to miss my game shows.

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And later, in the mid-'80s,

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when "Jeopardy" came back on the air,

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I remember running home from school every day to watch the show.

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It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house.

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And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working,

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where there was only one English language TV channel.

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There was Armed Forces TV,

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and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching.

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So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy."

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I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid.

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I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s

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and holding my own, back when that was a fad.

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There's a weird sense of mastery you get

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when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know.

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You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know.

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And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power --

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the right fact deployed at exactly the right place.

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I never had a guidance counselor

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who thought this was a legitimate career path,

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that thought you could major in trivia

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or be a professional ex-game show contestant.

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And so I sold out way too young.

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I didn't try to figure out what one does with that.

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I studied computers because I heard that was the thing,

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and I became a computer programmer --

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not an especially good one,

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not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on "Jeopardy" in 2004.

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But that's what I was doing.

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And it made it doubly ironic -- my computer background --

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a few years later, I think 2009 or so,

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when I got another phone call from "Jeopardy" saying,

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"It's early days yet, but IBM tells us

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they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.'

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Are you up for this?"

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This was the first I'd heard of it.

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And of course I said yes, for several reasons.

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One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time.

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It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on.

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(Laughter)

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And I would do it for nothing.

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I don't think they know that, luckily,

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but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons.

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I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have.

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And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future.

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People playing computers on game shows

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was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future,

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and now I could be on the stage with it.

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I was not going to say no.

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The third reason I said yes

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is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win.

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I had taken some artificial intelligence classes.

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I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on "Jeopardy."

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People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program

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that can read a "Jeopardy" clue in a natural language like English

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and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings,

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unpack the meaning of the clue.

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The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do,

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very hard for a computer.

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And I thought, well this is going to be child's play.

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Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species.

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(Laughter)

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But as the years went on,

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as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this,

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I started to get occasional updates from them,

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and I started to get a little more worried.

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I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph.

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It was a scatter chart showing performance on "Jeopardy,"

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tens of thousands of dots representing "Jeopardy" champions up at the top

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with their performance plotted on number of --

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I was going to say questions answered, but answers questioned, I guess,

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clues responded to --

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versus the accuracy of those answers.

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So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to.

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And at first, it was very low.

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There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena.

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But then you see the line start to go up.

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And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud.

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And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart

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some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color.

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And thought, what are these?

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"The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings."

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And I saw this line coming for me.

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And I realized, this is it.

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This is what it looks like when the future comes for you.

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(Laughter)

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It's not the Terminator's gun sight;

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it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do,

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the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at.

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And when the game eventually happened about a year later,

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it was very different than the "Jeopardy" games I'd been used to.

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We were not playing in L.A. on the regular "Jeopardy" set.

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Watson does not travel.

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Watson's actually huge.

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It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory,

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trillions of bytes of memory.

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We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room.

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The only other "Jeopardy" contestant to this day I've ever been inside.

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And so Watson does not travel.

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You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage.

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So me and the other human player

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wound up at this secret IBM research lab

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in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County

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to play the computer.

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And we realized right away

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that the computer had a big home court advantage.

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There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage.

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Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls,

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and there's the thing in the middle of their court.

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And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers

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cheering on their little darling,

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having poured millions of dollars into this

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hoping against hope that the humans screw up,

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and holding up "Go Watson" signs

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and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right.

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I think guys had "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their bellies in grease paint.

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If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their gut,

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it's an unpleasant sight.

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But they were right. They were exactly right.

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I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR,

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but Watson won handily.

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And I remember standing there behind the podium

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as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking.

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It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer.

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And you could hear that little tick, tick, tick, tick.

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And I remember thinking, this is it.

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I felt obsolete.

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I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s

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seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line.

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I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete

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under this new regime of thinking computers.

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And it hasn't been the last.

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If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally --

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and I see this all the time --

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that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically

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without actually needing a human pharmacist.

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And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals

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because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions.

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You don't need human assistants for that anymore.

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I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score

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from a baseball or football game

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and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game

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and was commenting on it.

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And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job

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as the humans they're replacing,

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but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper.

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So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be.

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I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies,

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we'll enter a new golden age of leisure

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when we'll all have time for the things we really love

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because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren.

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I've heard other people say quite the opposite,

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that this is yet another tier of the middle class

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that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology

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and that this is actually something ominous,

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something that we should worry about.

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I'm not an economist myself.

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All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work.

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And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible.

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Here's the one thing that I was ever good at,

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and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people

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and thousands of processors working in parallel

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and they could do the same thing.

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They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV,

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and "I'm sorry, Ken. We don't need you anymore."

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And it made me think, what does this mean,

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if we're going to be able to start outsourcing,

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not just lower unimportant brain functions.

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I'm sure many of you remember a distant time

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when we had to know phone numbers, when we knew our friends' phone numbers.

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And suddenly there was a machine that did that,

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and now we don't need to remember that anymore.

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I have read that there's now actually evidence

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that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships,

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physically shrinks and atrophies

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in people who use tools like GPS,

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because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore.

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We're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard.

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And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff

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gets smaller and dumber.

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And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better

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at knowing and remembering stuff than we are?

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Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that?

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Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less?

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As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know,

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this was a terrifying idea to me.

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The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important.

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The things we know are still important.

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I came to believe there were two advantages

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that those of us who have these things in our head have

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over somebody who says, "Oh, yeah. I can Google that. Hold on a second."

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There's an advantage of volume, and there's an advantage of time.

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The advantage of volume, first,

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just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays.

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There's so much information out there.

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Being a Renaissance man or woman,

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that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance.

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Now it's really not possible

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to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor.

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There's just too much.

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They say that the scope of human information

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is now doubling every 18 months or so,

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the sum total of human information.

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That means between now and late 2014,

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we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes,

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as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together.

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It's doubling every 18 months now.

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This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make

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require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts.

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A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in?

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Who do I vote for?

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Do I take this job or that one?

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These are the decisions that require correct judgments

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about many different kinds of facts.

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If we have those facts at our mental fingertips,

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we're going to be able to make informed decisions.

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If, on the other hand, we need to look them all up,

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we may be in trouble.

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According to a National Geographic survey I just saw,

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somewhere along the lines of 80 percent

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of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy

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cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map.

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If you can't do that first step,

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are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know

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to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy?

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Quite probably not.

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At some point you're just going to be like,

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"You know what? There's too much to know. Screw it."

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And you'll make a less informed decision.

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The other issue is the advantage of time that you have

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if you have all these things at your fingertips.

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I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith.

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She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England

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on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand.

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She runs up to them on the beach one morning

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and says, "Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach."

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And they say, "What do you mean? We just got here."

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And she said, "In Mr. Kearney's geography class last month,

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he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea

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and you see the waves churning way out there,

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that's the sign of a tsunami, and you need to clear the beach."

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What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this?

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Her parents thought about it,

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and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her.

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They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel,

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and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily,

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because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami,

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the day after Christmas, 2004,

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that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean.

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But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach,

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because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before.

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Now when facts come in handy like that --

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I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact,

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one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time --

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normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life.

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But in this case it happened in real life.

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And it happens in real life all the time.

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It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation.

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It's a meeting or job interview or first date

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or some relationship that gets lubricated

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because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge.

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You say where you're from, and I say, "Oh, yeah."

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Or your alma mater or your job,

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and I know just a little something about it,

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enough to get the ball rolling.

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People love that shared connection that gets created

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when somebody knows something about you.

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It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met.

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That's often the advantage of time.

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And it's not effective if you say, "Well, hold on.

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You're from Fargo, North Dakota. Let me see what comes up.

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Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo."

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That doesn't work. That's just annoying.

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(Laughter)

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The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson,

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Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it."

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And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that.

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I have always believed that the things we know -- that knowledge is an absolute good,

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that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads

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are what make us who we are,

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as individuals and as a species.

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I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete.

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I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced

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by these little bubbles of specialty,

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so that none of us know about the common associations

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that used to bind our civilization together.

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I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all

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sitting on a mountain somewhere,

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reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of "Simpsons" episodes

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and the lyrics of Abba songs.

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I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share

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and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices,

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to our search engines and our smartphones.

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In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think,

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things don't always end well.

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Those movies are never about beautiful utopias.

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It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in "2001."

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Things always go terribly wrong.

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And I feel like we're sort of at the point now

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where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in.

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This is a question of leadership,

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because it becomes a question of who leads the future.

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On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age

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where information is more universally available

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than it's ever been in human history,

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where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips.

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And on the other hand,

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we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia

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where the machines have taken over

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and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore,

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that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud,

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and why would we ever bother learning anything new.

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Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in.

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And we can all make that choice.

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We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn,

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who don't just say, "Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over,

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I don't have to learn anymore,"

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or "Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime.

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I don't have to learn new things anymore."

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No, every day we should be striving to learn something new.

353
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We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us.

354
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That's where the people you see on "Jeopardy" come from.

355
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These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants

356
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sitting at home memorizing the phone book.

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I've met a lot of them.

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For the most part, they are just normal folks

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who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything,

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thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject.

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We can live in one of these two worlds.

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We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know,

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continue to be the thing that makes us special,

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or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours.

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Thank you very much.