Robots Better Not Mess With My Shows Again

I watch Jeopardy every night with my roommates, and for the past month they’ve been advertising a match up between two humans and a robot computer named Watson. I’m not a geek by any means, in fact I have not had an X Files wall calendar in years and I only wear my coke bottle glasses at bedtime, so that just goes to show that I am no square. But Jeopardy (and, obviously, IBM) was hyping Watson up in a major way and I fell for it. I was very excited. Maybe not very. Let's go with pretty excited. Don't fucking judge me okay? It's the winter, there isn't much to look forward to. Anyway, I should have learned after a childhood with Christmases like mine that it's never smart to get your hopes up for future events.

I don't want to spoil anything, but I'm assuming that I'm the only one who DVRs Jeopardy, so if you missed the trifecta of Watson episodes this week, you'll probably never see it anyway. Well, in a surprising turn of evens, Watson, the super computer, beat the two greatest players in Jeopardy history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. What a total upset right? I don't know about anyone else, but I totally was not expecting a computer that simultaneously runs thousands of algorithms per millisecond for both comprehension and answer formulation to win.

• See Watson win here – and read more about him.

There were a couple embarrassing moments for Watson though. In the first episode, he repeated the same wrong answer as Ken, and when Trebek inevitably mocked him, Watson blushed orange. He also answered "Toronto," to a question that was under the category "US Cities." Oops. So it isn't a total breeze for old Watson; in fact, he isn't even connected to the Internet. And because he can't hear, the text of the question is submitted to him at the same time Alex asks it. Then he has to search through his database for the answer. Meanwhile, he's got two auditors breathing down his neck to make sure he doesn't sign online.

Let me break this down for you. Watson is this dick computer Dr. David Ferrucci, an engineer at IBM, dreamt up in 2007. I'm not going to trash talk his dreams, because my goal in life is to marry a rich dude and get tan at the pool all day, but let's be real. This guy was literally like, "I wish there was a computer to play Jeopardy against humans," and then he made it happen. A team of twenty-five research scientists built this analytical computing system, crammed one million books worth of information into it, and named it Watson. A probably similarly-sized team of IBM PR people smiled because they knew that humans still win at hyping brands through major outlets like TV game shows.

Watson understands "real language," which means he's not trying to hear that encoded noise only computers will get: he can comprehend what we're saying. Weird. What's weirder though, is that people spend four years of their lives and an estimated $100 million to create a computer to play a trivia game on television.

This is where my issue with Watson lies. Why are people wasting their time on this computer when there are bigger fish to fry? It’s not just a way to get everyone to buy some IBM mainframes, it’s also clearly a ploy to get everyone to watch Jeopardy. And it has worked. The second Watson episode gave Jeopardy the highest ratings they've had in six years. Sure, maybe it made America smarter for a minute. But the show was just so boring. And the audience was filled with geeks, and I hate looking at their pale creepy faces. I wish they had gone with a week's worth of celebrity Jeopardy instead. We can even compromise and have it be celebrity computers, or the household robots of our favorite celebs. No?

I also want to make sure we all know who Watson is named after, because it's not Dr. Watson from Sherlock Holmes. His namesake is Thomas J. Watson, the president of IBM from 1937 to his death in 1956. T.J. Watson made the company millions by marketing the punched card tabulating machine. This was the same punched card tabulating machine that the Nazi's used for their census, and we all know what that was for. The Nazis loved human Watson for making it super easy to keep track of all the Jews while they got ready for a Holocaust. Watson even accepted the Eagle with Star medal at a conference in Berlin. He gave it back three years later, but I'm pretty sure that didn't slow down the Nazi death machine. I'm also pretty confident in saying that Watson the computer is most probably a Nazi like his dad. You can go ahead and quote me on that. How else do you explain when he answered, "what is the Holocaust," when Tribeck asked, "what is the world's biggest hoax?" So on top of ruining the past three nights of Jeopardy for me, Watson is also a Nazi. What is IBM's problem?

The bottom line is, don't fuck with my television programming. I don't have much going in my life right now, unless you count my fantasy baseball team and basset hound clothing line, both of which only add to my street cred. Television, however, is a real stress outle. I have my evenings and weekends planned to a T, and just flip through the channels with lightening speed, never missing a second of programming. Ever since "The Lone Gunmen" got cancelled, Jeopardy has been my ace in the hole, and Watson really fucked the past three days up for me.

And don't think it's because I'm some kind of technology hater either. Because I'm not. I am all for machines and computers making my life easier. If I had a spoon that shovelled ice cream in my mouth for me, I would die of happiness, and I don't know if a vibrator counts as a robot, but I would empty out my bank account if they could improve upon the current model. My plans for this Friday include writing a letter to the producers of Jeopardy letting them know how badly that bastard Watson ruined my week and if they want to make it up to me, they need to at least get some celebrity robots in there. Otherwise me and my basset hound will have to find a new show to fill in my seven o'clock slot.