The next issue was what Watson would look like. For this, IBM brought in its lead advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather. With offices on Manhattan’s sprawling far West Side, where it shared a block with a Toyota dealership and a car wash, Ogilvy had been IBM’s primary agency since Louis Gerstner arrived at the company. Its creative minds were paid to think big, and in the first few meetings, they did. They considered creating an enormous wall of Watson. It would take over much of the Jeopardy set, perhaps in the form of a projected brain, with neurons firing, or maybe a virtual sketchpad, dancing with algorithms and formulas as the machine cogitated. “They were pretty grand ideas,” said David Korchin, the project’s creative director.
In talking to Jeopardy executives, though, it quickly became clear that they’d have to think smaller. If IBM’s Watson passed muster, it would be a guest on the show. It would not take it over. Its branding space, like that of any other contestant, would be limited to the face behind the podium—or whatever fit there. Jeopardy held the power and exercised it. If IBM’s computer was to benefit from an appearance on Jeopardy, the quiz show would lay down the rules.
Now that Watson was reduced from a possible Jumbotron to a human-sized space, what sort of creature would occupy it? “Would it look like a human?” asked Miles Gilbert, the art director. “Would it be an actual human? Was there a single person who could represent IBM?” At one point, he said, they considered establishing Watson as a child, one that learns and grows through an educational process. That didn’t make sense, though, because Watson would already be an adult by the time it showed up on TV. (And Jeopardy apparently wasn’t going to give IBM airtime to describe the education of young Watson.) The Ogilvy team also considered other types of figures. A new Pixar movie that year featured Wall-E, a lovable robot. Perhaps that was the right path for Watson.
Whether it was a cartoon figure or a bot like Wall-E, much of the discussion boiled down to how human Watson should be. The marketers feared that millions of viewers might find it unsettling if the computer looked or acted too much like a real person. Science fiction was full of evil “human” computers. HAL, the mutinous machine running the spaceship in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was the archetype. It killed four of the five astronauts on board. The last one had to remove the machine’s cognitive components one by one to save his own life. “We didn’t need this project and Watson to scare people about technology,” said Syken. “If you go to our YouTube channel and see the comments, you’ll see people talking about 2001 again and again, and IBM tracking people.” He had a point. In one short IBM video about technology in neonatal care, someone with the username Present10s commented: “This is creepy. Reminds me of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ Also a multinational taking over human bodies.”
Another thorny issue for IBM was jobs. Big Blue, perhaps as much as any company, was known for replacing people with machines. That was the nature of technology. In the 1940s, IBM turned its attention to the world’s industrial supply chains, the enormously complex processes that wound their way from the loading docks of iron mines to the shiny bumpers in a Cadillac showroom, from cattle herds in Kansas to the vendor selling hot dogs in Yankee Stadium. Each of these chains wound its way through depots, rolling mills, slaughterhouses, and packaging plants, providing jobs at every step. But these processes had evolved willy-nilly over the years and weren’t efficient. By building mathematical models of the supply chains, IBM could help companies cut out waste and duplication, speeding them up and slashing costs. This process, known as optimization, often eliminated jobs. The engine of optimization, and its symbol, was a big blue IBM mainframe computer.
In the following decades, computers continued to replace people, supplanting bank tellers, toll collectors, and night watchmen. Steel mills as big as cathedrals, which once crawled with workers, operated with skeleton crews, most of them just monitoring the computerized machinery. Robots moved on to automobile assembly lines. Good arguments could be made, of course, that inefficient companies faced extinction in a competitive global economy. In that sense, optimization and automation saved jobs. And in a healthy economy, workers would migrate toward more productive sectors, even if the transition was often painful. The quickly growing tech industry itself employed millions. For many, though, textbook economics and distant success stories provided little comfort. Computers, in the popular mind, killed jobs.
And IBM was producing ever more sophisticated models. Researchers in the company labs in Yorktown, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, were applying many of the lessons learned in the industrial world to the modern workplace. With a computerized workforce, like IBM’s own, each employee left an electronic record of clicks, updates, e-mails, and jobs completed. Researchers could analyze individual workers—their skills, the jobs they did, the effectiveness of their teams. The goal was to fine-tune the workforce. “We evaluate every job,” said Samer Takriti, who headed a study of company workers at IBM Research until 2007, “and we calculate whether it could be handled more efficiently offshore or by a machine.”
Given this type of analysis, it wasn’t hard to imagine that millions of television viewers might regard a question-answering computer as a fearsome competitor rather than a technological marvel. What’s more, as the IBM team discussed these issues in the fall of 2008, the global economy seemed to be collapsing. Watson’s turn on Jeopardy might well take place during a period of growing joblessness and economic fear. It could be the next Great Depression. In such a climate, they decided, a humanoid Watson might frighten people. In response, they moved to focus the publicity campaign less on the machine than on the team that built it. “This had to be a story about people,” said Syken.
When it came to Watson’s avatar, IBM and Ogilvy chose to avoid anything that might make it look human, opting for abstraction. The outlines of this avatar, as it turned out, were already taking shape in another division of the company. For a year, IBM’s global strategy team had been developing a campaign to communicate Big Blue’s technologies, and its mission, in a simple slogan. In a company with four hundred thousand people and hundreds of business lines, this was no easy task. What they settled on was data. In the modern economy, nearly every machine received instructions from the computer chips inside it. Many were already linked to networks, and others soon would be. These machines produced ever-growing rivers of digital data that detailed, minute by minute, the operations taking place across the planet. Many of these processes, such as bus routes, hospital deliveries, the patterns of traffic lights, had simply evolved over time, like the old industrial supply chains. They seemed to work. But given the data and much more that was en route, mathematically savvy analysts were able to revamp haphazard systems, saving time and energy. Science would replace intuition. The electrical grids, infused with new information technology, would grow smarter, predicting demand—house by house, business by business—and providing just the right amount of current to each user. Traffic patterns would be organized to reduce congestion and pollution. So would garbage collection, the delivery of health care and clean water, and the shuttling of farm goods to the cities. These intelligent systems were IBM’s niche. Technology would lead to what the company called a Smarter Planet.
Two days after the election of Barack Obama as president, on November 6, 2008, IBM´s chairman, Sam Palmisano, appeared before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City to unveil the Smarter Planet initiative. He framed it in the context of the global economic crisis, saying that the world would adopt these approaches “because we must.” He said that carrying on with the status quo, running business and government the traditional twentieth-century way, had led to the economic and environmental crises and was “not smart enough to be sustainable.” Illustrating his talk was an icon of the planet Earth with five bars radiating from it. This was Chubby Planet, and the bars represented intelligence.
Chubby Planet soon became the basis of Watson’s avatar. It made sense. Chubby was abstract. It represent
ed intelligence. And it fit into IBM’s global branding effort. In one form or another, the Watson version of Chubby Planet would express the machine’s cognitive processes—without betraying emotion. The IBM-Ogilvy team decided that the computer would answer the questions in a friendly, even-keeled male voice. It would not change with the flow of the game. No voiced frustration, no regrets, and certainly no gloating.
But at the heart of the decision-making process was a paradox: A company built on scientific analysis was running a global branding campaign from intuition. Before launching any new product, IBM had the means and expertise to carry out sophisticated tests analyzing public reaction. The research division had an entire social media unit, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that specialized in new methods of tracking consumer sentiments through the shifting words and memes cascading across the Internet and sites like Twitter and Facebook. IBM’s consultants around the world were helping other companies tie these studies to their businesses. Yet when it came to creating the face, voice, and personality of its own game-playing computer, the IBM team relied on instincts—a vague sense they had of consumers’ interests and fears. IBM and Ogilvy ran the campaign in a way that Watson could never compute: from the gut.
This isn’t to say that statistical analysis would have pointed IBM toward an ideal form and personality for Watson. People’s attitudes about computers, and what they should express, were complicated, and they varied—by generation, geography, and gender. Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor and author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, studies the relations between humans and their machines. In one experiment, people played blackjack against a computer. The computer was represented by a photograph of a person along with a cartoon-like bubble for text. In one scenario, the computer expressed interest only in itself—“I’m happy, I won.” In another, it empathized only with its opponent, and in a third, it expressed feelings for both itself and its opponent. The humans in the test certainly didn’t like the self-centered computer. But the males in the test group preferred it when the computer showed interest only in them, while females favored the balanced approach.
One lesson from this and other studies, according to Nass, is that people quickly develop feelings, from admiration to resentment, for the machines they encounter. And this was sure to be the case for millions when they saw Watson playing Jeopardy on their television. He argued that people would feel more positively toward a computer that expressed feelings to match its performance. “That computer had better have some emotion,” he said. “It should sound stressed if it’s not doing well.” If it didn’t express emotions, he said, it would seem alien and perhaps menacing. “When it sits there and it’s not clear what it wants, we think, ‘What the hell is going on?’” he said. “The scariest movies are when you don’t know what something wants.”
In IBM’s defense, even if the company had wanted to provide Watson with a rich and modulated human voice, it would have required a large development effort to build it. Existing voice technology came close to expressing human emotion but was still a bit off. The IBM team worried that people would resent, or fear, a computer that tried to mimic the emotional range of the human voice and fell short. To save money and reduce that risk, they adapted a friendly bionic voice they already had on a shelf. This Watson would remain relentlessly upbeat through the ups and downs of its Jeopardy career.
Not that the avatar wouldn’t be expressive in its own way. Working in his Long Island studio, Joshua Davis was devising schemes to represent Watson’s cognitive processes. He worked with forty-two threads of color that would stream and swarm across Watson’s round avatar according to what was going on in its “mind.” It would look a bit like the glass globes at science museums, where each touch of a human hand summons jagged ribbons of lightning. Davis, a sci-fi buff, picked the number forty-two as an homage to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In that book, a computer named Deep Thought calculated the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. It was forty-two. Someday, perhaps, a smarter computer would come up with the question for which forty-two was the answer. For Davis, the forty-two threads were his own little flourish within the larger work. “It’s my Easter egg,” he said.
But what stories would those threads be telling? The Ogilvy team started by dissecting videos of Jeopardy games. They divided the game into the various states. They began with the booming voice of the longtime announcer, Johnny Gilbert, saying, “This is Jeopardy!” They continued through the applause, the introduction of the contestants and the host, Alex Trebek, and every possible permutation after that: when Watson won the buzz, when it lost, when the other player chose a category, and when the contestants puzzled over Final Jeopardy, scribbling their responses. There were a total of thirty-six states, each with its prescribed camera shot, many of them just a second or two long. (Davis was disappointed that they couldn’t find six more, raising it to his magical number. “If we could just get it to forty-two,” he joked, “I’m pretty sure something quantum mechanical could happen, like a tornado of butterflies.”)
Still, it was clear that unless Watson got special treatment, the avatar would garner precious little screen time. When it answered a question, the camera would be focused on it for between 1.7 and 5 seconds. And during its most intense cognitive stages—when it was considering a question, going through the millions of documents, and choosing among candidate answers—the camera would stay fixed for a crucial 3 or 4 seconds on the clue. In essence, Davis had to prepare an avatar for a series of cameo appearances. He said he was unfazed. “Watson is that ultimate challenge,” he said. “I’ve got milliseconds of time where I need to present something that’s compelling and dynamic.” He went about developing different patterns for the thirty-six cognitive states in the computer. The threads would flow into a plethora of patterns and colors as it waited, listened, searched, buzzed, and pronounced its answer. The threads would soar when Watson bounded with confidence, droop when it felt confused.
While all of this work was in progress, the Jeopardy challenge remained a closely guarded secret. But that changed in the spring of 2009. IBM’s top executives, excited about the prospect of the upcoming match, wanted to highlight it in the company’s annual shareholder meeting, scheduled for April 28 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. To prepare for the media coverage sure to follow, the computer scientists on Ferrucci’s team were ferried into New York City to receive media training. They were instructed to focus on the human aspect of their venture—the people creating the machine—and to avoid broader questions concerning IBM, such as the company’s financial prospects or its growing offshore business.
Only one problem. The agreement IBM and Jeopardy had in place was little more than a handshake. They had to nail it down. IBM, said executives, was hoping to hammer out a deal that would include airtime for corporate messaging, perhaps telling the history of Watson, how it worked, and what such machines portended for the Information Age. But once again, Harry Friedman and his Jeopardy colleagues had all the leverage. IBM needed an agreement right away. Jeopardy did not. So Big Blue got a tentative deal, pending Watson’s performance over the coming year, in time for the Miami meeting. But other than that, the negotiators came back from Culver City empty-handed, with no promises of extra airtime or other promotional concessions.
Not everything hinged on the final game. IBM hoped that Watson would enjoy a career long after the Jeopardy showdown. They had plans for it to tour extensively, perhaps at company events or schools. This mobile Watson might be just a simulation, running on a laptop. Or maybe they could run the big Watson, the hundreds or thousands of processors at the Hawthorne labs, from a remote pickup. The touring Watson would have advantages, at least from Joshua Davis’s perspective. Freed from the constraints of Jeopardy production, people would have more time to study the changing moods and states of Watson’s avatar. Of course, even the touring machine would have to comply with the provisions surrounding Jeopardy’s brand and
programming. That meant more negotiations, most likely with Harry Friedman still holding most of the cards.
Even as the avatar took shape, no one knew what sort of display it would run on. Davis and the Ogilvy team considered many options to house the avatar, including one technology that projected holograms on a pillar of fog. But they eventually turned to more traditional displays. In that realm, few could compete with Sony, Jeopardy’s parent company. Friedman said that Sony engineers conceivably could create a display for Watson, but that such an effort would probably require a call from IBM’s Sam Palmisano to Sony’s top executive, Howard Stringer. “We said, ‘That’s not going to happen,’” said one IBM executive. “We’ll save that call for something more important.” Still Sony had a possibility. In December, a team of five Sony employees flew from Tokyo to the Yorktown labs with a prototype of a new display. It was a projection technology so secret, they said, that no one could even take pictures of it. IBM considered it a bit too small for the Watson avatar, the Japanese contingent flew home, and the search continued.
Vannevar Bush, the visionary who in the 1940s imagined a mechanical World Wide Web, once wrote that “electronic brains” would have to be as big as the Empire State Building and require Niagara Falls to cool them. Of course, the computers he knew filled entire rooms, were built of vacuum tubes, and lacked the processing power of a hand-me-down cell phone. While Davis continued to develop Watson’s face, Ferrucci’s team started to grapple with a new challenge. To date, their work had focused on building software to master Jeopardy. Watson was only a program, like Microsoft’s Windows operating system or the video game Grand Theft Auto. To compete against humans, the Watson program would have to run on a specially designed machine. This would be Watson’s body. It might not end up as big as a skyscraper, but it would be a monster all the same. That much was clear.
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