WRC 1013/1023: Freshman Composition: Exploring Critical Issues

" In the weeks since IBM's computer, Watson, thrashed two flesh-and-blood champions in the quiz show "Jeopardy!," human intelligence has been punching back -- at least on blogs and opinion pages. When asked if Watson can "think," David Ferrucci, IBM's chief scientist on the "Jeopardy!" team, responds: "Can a submarine swim?" As these computers make their way into law offices, pharmaceutical labs and hospitals, people who currently make a living by answering questions must adjust.

"In the end, the humans on ''Jeopardy!'' surrendered meekly."

"If you don't play Pokemon Go, you probably feel like you're in the middle of a Demon Headmaster novel right now. Everyone you know is enchanted with this weird new social phenomenon, which is spreading with astonishing speed. You go to work and everyone is into it. You come home and your spouse has it too. Surely something sinister is afoot? Surely it's part of some kind of plot to take over the entire country? If so, it's already too late."

"It’s just a bigger and fancier version of my laptop’s totally annoying program. It decomposes the question put to it into discrete bits of data and then searches its vast data base for statistically frequent combinations of the bits it is working with. The achievement is impressive but it is a wholly formal achievement that involves no knowledge (the computer doesn’t know anything in the relevant sense of “know”); and it does not come within a million miles of replicating the achievements of everyday human thought."

"The early electronic computer did not have much going for it except a prodigious memory and some good math skills, but today the best models can be wired up to learn by experience, follow an argument, ask pertinent questions and write pleasing poetry and music. They can also carry on somewhat distracted conversations so convincingly that their human partners do not know they are talking to a machine."

"An anxious student recently appeared at my office door. He was considering not applying to the master’s of accounting program; a professor elsewhere in the business school had told him accountants would be obsolete within a matter of years."

"At Diapers.com, the warehouses are built for robots. The warehouse is constantly shifting according to the popularity of the products, the layout of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Kiva Systems' robots represent a new era in artificial intelligence. This artificial intelligence does not try to Imitate the brain. It uses massive data sets, sensors, algorithms, and machine learning to grasp specific tasks."

"Palmer Luckey has never used an Oculus Rift. That’s what the founder of Oculus keeps telling himself as he unboxes the commercial version of the virtual reality system he invented. Opens the package. Takes out the few elements—the headset, the single cable that connects it to a computer, the small cylindrical infrared camera that tracks it in space. Runs through the setup. And finally puts on the headset and takes stock of his surroundings."

"The recent victory of an IBM computer named Watson over human contestants on the TV show "Jeopardy!" has produced a flood of commentaries to the effect that computer understanding now equals -- or perhaps even exceeds -- human understanding. The problem with the digital computer is not that it is too much of a machine to have human understanding."

"A new term has become popular among some social media researchers: 'Digital Dualism.' Such researchers seemed to have invented this term in order to object to the concepts implied by it. They claim that advocates of digital dualism have created a false dichotomy of spaces as well as a false dichotomy of real versus virtual."

"There are video games that go viral overnight, causing people to coop themselves up in their homes for days to play. But the opposite has happened with Pokémon Go, a free smartphone game that has soared to the top of the download charts: It has sent people into streets and parks, onto beaches and even out to sea in a kayak in the week since it was released. The game — in which players try to capture exotic monsters from Pokémon, the Japanese cartoon franchise — uses a combination of ordinary technologies built into smartphones, including location tracking and cameras, to encourage people to visit public landmarks, seeking virtual loot and collectible characters that they try to nab."