Final Jeopardy (14 page)

What's more, a big switch had occurred since the 1990s. It used to be that the most advanced machinery was found at work. Children whose parents went to offices would sometimes get a chance to play with the adding machines there, along with the intercoms, fancy photocopiers, and phones with illuminated buttons for five or six different lines. But at the dawn of the new century, the office appeared to lose its grip on cool technology. Now people often had snazzier gadgets at home, and in their pockets, than at work. Companies like Apple and Google targeted consumers and infused technology with fun, zip, even desire. Tech companies that served the business market, by contrast—Oracle, Germany's SAP, Cisco, and IBM—tended to stress the boring stuff: reliability, efficiency, and security. They were valuable qualities, to be sure, but deadening for a brand. IBM needed some sizzle. It was competing for both investors and brainpower with the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook—even the movie studio Pixar. It had to establish itself in the popular imagination as a company that took risks and was engaged in changing the world with bleeding-edge technology. The
Jeopardy
challenge, with this talking IBM machine on national television matching wits with game-show luminaries, was the branding opportunity of the decade. The name had to be good.

Was THINQ the right choice, or perhaps THINQER? How about Exaqt or Ace? Working with the New York branding firm VSA Partners, IBM came up with dozens of candidates. The goals, according to a VSA summary, were to emphasize the business value of the technology, create a close tie to IBM, steer clear of names that were “too cute,” and lead the audience “to root for the machine.”

One group of names had strong links to IBM. Deep Logic evoked Deep Blue, the computer that mastered chess. System/QA recalled the iconic mainframe System/360. Other names stressed intelligence. Qwiz, for example, blended “Q,” for question, with “wiz” to suggest that the technology had revolutionized search. The pronunciation—quiz—fit the game show theme. Another choice, nSight, referred to “n,” representing infinite possibilities. And EureQA blended “eureka” with the Q-A for question-answering. Another candidate “Mined,” pointed to the machine's datamining prowess.

On the day of the naming meeting, December 12, all of the logic behind the various choices was promptly ignored as people focused on the simplest of names in the category associated with IBM's brand: Watson. “It just felt so right,” said Syken. “As soon as it came up, we knew we had it.” Watson invoked IBM's founder. This was especially fitting since Thomas J. Watson had also established the research division, originally on the campus of Columbia University, in 1945. The Watson name was also a nod to the companion and chronicler of Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant fictional sleuth. In those stories, of course, Dr. Watson was clearly the lesser of the two intellects. But considering public apprehension about all-knowing machines, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to name a question-answering computer after an earnest and plodding assistant.

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 represented 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.”