Watson on Jeopardy February 14th

Watson produced answers to real questions, and it did so quickly and in ways that could only dimly be anticipated or understood by its designers. It beat its human opponents! This is a stunning achievement. A dazzling display of real-world, real-time responsiveness in action. Watson can think!

But hold on. Not so fast. Even if Watson is bristling and buzzing with intelligence, we can legitimately wonder whether it's the natural intelligence of its programmers that is in evidence, rather than that of Watson.

The IBM design team led by David Ferrucci built Watson to act as if it understood meanings that are, in fact, not available to it. And maybe that's the upshot of what Dan Dennett has called Darwin's dangerous idea; that's the way, the only way, meaning and thinking gets into the world, through natural (or artificial) design. Watson is surely nothing like us, as we fantasize ourselves to be. But if Darwin and Dennett are right, we may turn out to be a lot more like Watson than we ever imagined.

Now here's the rub. Watson, biologically speaking, if you get my drift, is a plant. Watson is big and it is rooted. Like all plants, it is deaf, blind, and immobile; it is basically incapable of directing action of any kind on the world around it. For it is right there — in the space that opens up between the animal and the world, in the situations that require of the animal that it shape and guide and organize its own actions and interactions with its surroundings — that intelligence ever enters the scene.