Om cirka to uger, er det niende jubilæum for den dag hvor jeg for første gang gik ud i det hæderkronede Jeopardy sæt. Jeg mener, ni år er lang tid. Og set i forhold til Jeopardys gennemsnitlige demografi, tror jeg det betyder at størstedelen af de mennesker der så mig i det show nu er døde. (Latter) Men ikke alle, der er stadig et par stykker der lever. Det sker af og til at jeg stadig bliver genkendt i indkøbscenteret eller sådan noget. Og når det sker, er det som en der ved det hele. Jeg tror det skib er sejlet, det er for sent for mig. I medgang og modgang, så er det sådan jeg bliver genkendt, som fyren der kendte en masse skøre ting.
In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set. I mean, nine years is a long time. And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics, I think what that means is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead. (Laughter) But not all, a few are still alive. Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever. And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all. I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me. For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as, as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff.
Og jeg kan ikke klage over dette. Jeg har det som om det på en eller anden måde altid var min skæbne, selvom jeg i mange år havde været meget dybt nede i småtings skabet. Om ikke andet, bliver man som teenager virkelig hurtig klar over, at det ikke er et hit hos pigerne at kende Kaptajn Kirks mellemnavn. (Latter) Og som resultat, var jeg på en eller anden måde det utrolig barrikaderede bedrevidende barn i mange år. Men hvis man går længere tilbage, hvis man kigger på det, er det hele der. Jeg var den slags barn der altid irriterede mor og far med en eller anden fantastisk oplysning jeg lige havde læst om -- Haleys komet eller kæmpe blæksprutter eller størrelsen på verdens største græskartærte, eller hvad det nu var. Jeg har nu selv en tiårig der er nøjagtig på samme måde. Og jeg ved hvor utrolig irriterende det er, så karma fungerer. (Latter)
And I can't complain about this. I feel like that was always sort of my destiny, although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet. If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager, it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name. (Laughter) And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years. But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there. I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad with whatever great fact I had just read about -- Haley's comet or giant squids or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was. I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same. And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work. (Laughter)
Og jeg elskede game shows , fascineret af game shows. Jeg kan huske at jeg græd den første dag i børnehaveklassen tilbage i 1979 fordi det slog mig, at uanset hvor meget jeg gerne ville gå i skole, så ville jeg også gå glip af Hollywood Squares og Family Feud. Jeg ville gå glip af mine game shows. Og senere, i midten af 80'erne, da Jeopardy kom tilbage i æteren, kan jeg huske at jeg løb hjem fra skole hver dag for at se udsendelsen. Det var mit yndlings show, selv inden det betalte for mit hus. Og vi boede i udlandet, vi levede i Sydkorea hvor min far arbejdede, hvor der kun var en tv kanal hvor de talte engelsk. Der var Armed Forces TV, og hvis man ikke talte koreansk, så var det det man så. Så jeg og alle mine venner løb hjem hver dag og se Jeopardy.
And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows. I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979 because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school, that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud." I was going to miss my game shows. And later, in the mid-'80s, when "Jeopardy" came back on the air, I remember running home from school every day to watch the show. It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house. And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working, where there was only one English language TV channel. There was Armed Forces TV, and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching. So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy."
Jeg var altid den slags barn der var besat af paratviden. Jeg kan huske at jeg var i stand til at spille Trivial Pursuit mod mine forældre tilbage i 80'erne og jeg svarede for mig, dengang det var en dille. Det er en mærkelig følelse af magt man får når man har et lille stykke interessant viden som mor og far ikke har. Man kender et faktum om Beatles som far ikke kendte. Og man tænker, ah hah, viden er i sandhed magt -- det rette faktum brugt på præcis det rigtige tidspunkt.
I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid. I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s and holding my own, back when that was a fad. There's a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know. You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know. And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power -- the right fact deployed at exactly the right place.
Jeg havde aldrig en studievejleder der mente at dette var en legitim karrierevej, der mente at man kunne have et hovedfag i paratviden, eller være professionel tidligere deltager i en tv-quiz. Så jeg solgte ud af mig selv for tidligt. Jeg prøvede ikke at finde ud af hvad man gør med det. Jeg studerede computere, fordi jeg havde hørt at det var emnet, og jeg blev computerprogrammør -- ikke en specielt god en af slagsen, ikke en specielt tilfreds en af slagsen da jeg var i Jeopardy for første gang i 2004. Men det var det jeg gjorde.
I never had a guidance counselor who thought this was a legitimate career path, that thought you could major in trivia or be a professional ex-game show contestant. And so I sold out way too young. I didn't try to figure out what one does with that. I studied computers because I heard that was the thing, and I became a computer programmer -- not an especially good one, not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on "Jeopardy" in 2004. But that's what I was doing.
Og jeg gjorde det dobbelt ironisk -- min computermæssige baggrund -- et par år senere, jeg tror det var i 2009 eller så, da jeg fik endnu et opkald fra Jeopardy der sagde, "Det er stadig tidligt, men IBM fortæller os at de vil bygge en supercomputer der kan slå dig i Jeopardy. Er du med på den?" Det var første gang jeg hørte om det. Og selvfølgelig sagde jeg ja, af adskillige årsager. For det første, fordi Jeopardi er sjovt. Det er sjovt. Det er det sjoveste man kan lave mens man har bukser på. (Latter) Og jeg ville gøre det gratis. Jeg tror ikke at de vidste det, heldigvis, men jeg ville tage tilbage og spille for Arbys kuponer. Jeg elsker bare Jeopardy, og det har jeg altid gjort. Og for det andet, fordi jeg er en nørdet fyr og dette så ud til at være fremtiden. Mennesker der spiller mod computere på game shows var den slags ting jeg altid havde forestillet mig ville ske i fremtiden, og nu kunne jeg være på scenen med den. Jeg ville ikke sige nej.
And it made it doubly ironic -- my computer background -- a few years later, I think 2009 or so, when I got another phone call from "Jeopardy" saying, "It's early days yet, but IBM tells us they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.' Are you up for this?" This was the first I'd heard of it. And of course I said yes, for several reasons. One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time. It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on. (Laughter) And I would do it for nothing. I don't think they know that, luckily, but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons. I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have. And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future. People playing computers on game shows was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future, and now I could be on the stage with it. I was not going to say no.
Den tredje grund til at jeg sagde ja var fordi jeg var temmelig sikker på at jeg ville vinde. Jeg havde taget nogle kurser i kunstig intelligens. Jeg vidste at der ikke var nogen computere der kunne gøre det man skal for at kunne vinde i Jeopardy. Folk er ikke klar over hvor svært det er at skrive sådan et program, der kan læse en Jeopardy ledetråd i et naturligt sprog som det engelske, og forstå alle tvetydighederne, ordspil, sarkasmen, udfolde betydningen af ledetråden. Den slags ting som et tre-, fireårigt menneske, lille barn kan gøre, er meget svært for en computer. Og jeg tænkte, jamen det her kommer til at være barnemad. Ja, jeg vil møde op og ødelægge computeren og forsvare arten. (Latter)
The third reason I said yes is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win. I had taken some artificial intelligence classes. I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on "Jeopardy." People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program that can read a "Jeopardy" clue in a natural language like English and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings, unpack the meaning of the clue. The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do, very hard for a computer. And I thought, well this is going to be child's play. Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species. (Laughter)
Men som tiden gik, i takt med at IBM begyndte at kaste penge og mandetimer og processor hastighed efter dette, begyndte jeg at få sporadiske opdateringer fra dem, og jeg begyndte at blive lidt mere bekymret. Jeg kan huske, at der i et blad var en artikel om denne nye spørgsmål/svar software med en graf. Det var et punktdiagram der viser præstationen på Jeopardy, titusindevis af prikker der repræsenterede Jeopardy vinderne i toppen med deres præstation plottet ind -- Jeg skulle til at sige besvarede spørgsmål, men svar der blev stillet spørgsmål til, mener jeg, ledetråd der blev svaret på -- imod nøjagtigheden af de svar. Der er et bestemt præstations niveau som computeren skulle nå. Og i starten var det meget lavt. Der var ikke nogen software der kunne konkurrere i denne slags arena. Men så ser man at linjen begynder at gå opad. Og den kommer meget tæt på det man kalder vinderskyen. Og jeg lagde mærke til nogle mørkere prikker i det øvre højre hjørne af punktdiagrammet, nogle sorte prikker, der havde en anden farve. Og jeg tænkte, hvad er det? "De sorte prikker i det øvre, højre hjørne repræsenterer Jeopardy mesteren Ken Jennings der har vundet 74 gange." Og jeg så denne linje komme efter mig. Og jeg blev klar over, at det var det. Det er sådan her det ser ud, når fremtiden kommer efter en. (Latter) Det er ikke Terminatorens sigtekorn; det er en lille linje der kommer tættere og tættere på den ting man kan finde ud af, den eneste ting der gør en speciel, den ting man er bedst til.
But as the years went on, as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this, I started to get occasional updates from them, and I started to get a little more worried. I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph. It was a scatter chart showing performance on "Jeopardy," tens of thousands of dots representing "Jeopardy" champions up at the top with their performance plotted on number of -- I was going to say questions answered, but answers questioned, I guess, clues responded to -- versus the accuracy of those answers. So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to. And at first, it was very low. There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena. But then you see the line start to go up. And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud. And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color. And thought, what are these? "The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings." And I saw this line coming for me. And I realized, this is it. This is what it looks like when the future comes for you. (Laughter) It's not the Terminator's gun sight; it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do, the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at.
Og da spillet i sidste ende blev spillet cirka et år senere, var det meget anderledes end de Jeopardy spil jeg havde været vant til. Vi spillede ikke i L.A. på den sædvanlige Jeopardy kulisse. Watson rejser ikke. Watson er faktisk kæmpestor. Det er tusindevis af processorer, en terabyte hukommelse, trillioner af bytes af hukommelse. Vi gik igennem dette klima-kontrollerede server lokale. Den eneste anden Jeopardy deltager som jeg til dags dato har været inden i. Så Watson rejser ikke. Man skal komme til den; man skal tage pilgrimsrejsen.
And when the game eventually happened about a year later, it was very different than the "Jeopardy" games I'd been used to. We were not playing in L.A. on the regular "Jeopardy" set. Watson does not travel. Watson's actually huge. It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory, trillions of bytes of memory. We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room. The only other "Jeopardy" contestant to this day I've ever been inside. And so Watson does not travel. You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage.
Jeg og en anden menneskelig spiller endte på dette hemmelige IBM forsknings laboratorium midt i denne snefyldte skov i Westchester County for at spille imod computeren. Og vi blev med det samme klar over at computeren havde en stor hjemmebanefordel. Der var et stort Watson logo på midten af scenen. Ligesom når man skal til at spille imod Chicago Bulls, og der er den ting i midten af deres bane. Og publikummet var fuldt af chefer og programmører fra IBM der heppede på deres lille skat, efter have hældt millioner af dollars i den og håbede imod oddsene at menneskene begik en fejltagelse, og holdte "Go Watson" skilte op og klappede som mødre til en skønhedskonkurrence, hver gang deres lille skat gav et rigtigt svar. I tror at gutterne havde skrevet "W-A-T-S-O-N" hen over deres mave med oliemaling. Hvis man kan forestille sig computer programmører med bogstaverne "W-A-T-S-O-N" skrevet hen over deres mave, er det et ubehageligt syn.
So me and the other human player wound up at this secret IBM research lab in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County to play the computer. And we realized right away that the computer had a big home court advantage. There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage. Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls, and there's the thing in the middle of their court. And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers cheering on their little darling, having poured millions of dollars into this hoping against hope that the humans screw up, and holding up "Go Watson" signs and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right. I think guys had "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their bellies in grease paint. If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their gut, it's an unpleasant sight.
Men de havde ret. De havde fuldstændig ret. Jeg vil ike afsløre det, hvis man stadig har optagelsen på recorderen, men Watson vandt nemt. Og jeg kan huske at jeg stod der bag podiet hvor jeg kunne høre denne lille insektlignende tommelfinger klikke. Den havde en robot tommelfinger der trykkede på knappen. Og man kunne høre det lille tick, tick, tick, tick. Og jeg kan huske at jeg tænkte, nu sker det. Jeg følte mig undværlig. Jeg følte mig som en fabriksarbejder i Detroit i 80'erne der så en robot der nu kunne klare hans job på samlebåndet. Jeg følte at game show deltager nu var det første job der var blevet undværligt under dette nye regime af tænkende computere. Og det var ikke den sidste.
But they were right. They were exactly right. I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR, but Watson won handily. And I remember standing there behind the podium as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking. It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer. And you could hear that little tick, tick, tick, tick. And I remember thinking, this is it. I felt obsolete. I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers. And it hasn't been the last.
Hvis man ser nyhederne, vil man af og til se -- og jeg ser det hele tiden -- at farmaceuter nu, der er en maskine der automatisk kan fylde recepter uden at der faktisk er brug for en menneskelig apoteker. Og mange advokatfirmaer fyrer nu juridiske assistenter fordi der findes software der kan opsummere retspraksis og sagsresumé og afgørelser. Man har ikke brug for menneskelige assistenter for det mere. Den anden dag læste jeg om et program hvor man giver den stillingen fra en baseball eller fodboldkamp og den spytter en artikel ud som om et menneske havde set kampen og kommenterede den. Og selvfølgelig kan disse nye teknologier ikke udføre et lige så smart eller kreativt arbejde som de mennesker de erstatter, men de er hurtigere, og afgørende, de er meget, meget billigere. Det får mig til at mig over den økonomiske effekt som dette kunne have. Jeg har læst om økonomer der siger, at som resultat af disse nye teknologier, vil vi gå ind i en ny gylden alder af bekvemmelighed når vi alle har tid til de ting vi virkelig holder af fordi alle disse byrdefulde opgaver vil blive overtaget af Watson og hans digitale søskende. Jeg har hørt andre mennesker der siger det modsatte, at dette er endnu et lag af middelklassen der oplever at den ting de holder af bliver taget fra dem af en ny teknologi og at dette faktisk er noget ildevarslende, noget som vi skal være bekymret over.
If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally -- and I see this all the time -- that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically without actually needing a human pharmacist. And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions. You don't need human assistants for that anymore. I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score from a baseball or football game and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game and was commenting on it. And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job as the humans they're replacing, but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper. So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be. I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies, we'll enter a new golden age of leisure when we'll all have time for the things we really love because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren. I've heard other people say quite the opposite, that this is yet another tier of the middle class that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology and that this is actually something ominous, something that we should worry about.
Jeg er ikke økonom selv. Jeg ved kun hvordan det føltes at være fyren der bliver gjort arbejdsløs. Og det var pokkers demoraliserende. Det var forfærdeligt. Her var den ene ting jeg nogensinde var god til, og det eneste det krævede for at kunne gøre det samme, var at IBM hældte et tocifret millionbeløb og deres klogeste folk og tusindevis af processorer der arbejdede parallel. De kunne gøre det lidt hurtigere og lidt bedre på landsdækkende TV, og "Jeg er ked af det, Ken. Vi har ikke brug for dig mere." Og det fik mig til at tænke, hvad dette betyder, hvis vi bliver i stand til at outsource, ikke kun de lavere, ubetydelige hjernefunktioner. Jeg er sikker på at mange af jer kan huske en fjern fortid hvor vi alle skulle huske telefonnumre, da vi kendte vores venners telefonnumre. Og pludselig var der en maskine der gjorde det, og nu behøver vi ikke at huske det mere. Jeg har læst at der nu faktisk findes beviser på at hippocampus, den del af vores hjerne der håndterer rummelige forhold, fysisk krymper og svinder ind hos mennesker der bruger værktøjer som GPS, fordi vi ikke længere træner vores retningssans mere. Vi adlyder bare en lille talende stemme på vores instrumentbræt, Og resultatet er, at en stor del af vores hjerne der skal gøre den slags ting bliver mindre og mindre. Og jeg tror det fik mig til at tænke, hvad sker der når computerne nu er bedre til at vide og huske ting end vi er? Vil hele vores hjerne begynde at krympe og svinde ind på den måde? Begynder vi som kultur at sætte mindre og mindre pris på viden? Som en person der altid har troet på vigtigheden af de ting vi ved, var dette en frygtindgydende ide for mig.
I'm not an economist myself. All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work. And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible. Here's the one thing that I was ever good at, and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people and thousands of processors working in parallel and they could do the same thing. They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV, and "I'm sorry, Ken. We don't need you anymore." And it made me think, what does this mean, if we're going to be able to start outsourcing, not just lower unimportant brain functions. I'm sure many of you remember a distant time when we had to know phone numbers, when we knew our friends' phone numbers. And suddenly there was a machine that did that, and now we don't need to remember that anymore. I have read that there's now actually evidence that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships, physically shrinks and atrophies in people who use tools like GPS, because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore. We're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard. And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff gets smaller and dumber. And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better at knowing and remembering stuff than we are? Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that? Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less? As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know, this was a terrifying idea to me.
Jo mere jeg ved om det, blev jeg klar over, nej, det er stadig vigtigt. De ting vi ved er stadig vigtige. Jeg begyndte at tro på at der er to fordele som de af os der har ting i vores hoved har frem for nogen der siger, "Nå ja. Det kan jeg Google. Vent et øjeblik." Der er en fordel ved volumen, og der er en fordel i tid.
The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important. The things we know are still important. I came to believe there were two advantages that those of us who have these things in our head have over somebody who says, "Oh, yeah. I can Google that. Hold on a second." There's an advantage of volume, and there's an advantage of time.
Først fordelen ved volume, det har bare at gøre med kompleksiteten i nutidens verden. Der er så meget information derude. At være en renæssance mand eller kvinde, der er noget der kun kunne lade sig gøre under renæssancen. Nu er det i virkeligheden ikke muligt at være rimelig uddannet i hvert af menneskets bestræbelser. Der er bare for meget. De siger at omfanget af menneskets information fordobles cirka hver 18. måned, sammen af menneskets totale information. Det betyder, at fra nu og til slutningen af 2014, vil vi generere lige så meget information, målt i gigabyte, som hele menneskeheden har samlet i det foregående årtusinde. Det fordobles hver 18. måned nu. Det er frygtindgydende fordi mange af de store beslutninger vi træffer, kræver at man mestrer mange forskellige fakta. En beslutning som hvor man skal gå i skole? Hvad skal mit hovedfag være? Hvad skal jeg stemme på? Tager jeg dette arbejde eller det andet? Dette er beslutninger der kræver den rigtige dømmekraft om mange forskellige faktum. Hvis vi har de fakta i vores mentale fingerspidser, er vi stand til at træffe kvalificeret beslutninger. Hvis, på den anden side, vi skal slå det hele op, kan vi få problemer. Ifølge et studie fra National Geographic jeg lige så, er det noget i retningen af 80 procent af menneskene der stemmer til præsidentvalget i USA omkring emner som udenlands politik ikke kan finde Irak eller Afghanistan på et kort, Hvis man ikke kan tage dette første skridt, vil man så virkelig slå alle de andre tusinde fakta op, som man har brug for at vide for at have en god viden om USAs udenrigspolitik? Højst sandsynligt ikke. På et tidspunkt siger man sikkert, "Ved du hvad? Der er for meget man skal vide. Glem det." Og man tager beslutninger der er mindre kvalificerede.
The advantage of volume, first, just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays. There's so much information out there. Being a Renaissance man or woman, that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance. Now it's really not possible to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor. There's just too much. They say that the scope of human information is now doubling every 18 months or so, the sum total of human information. That means between now and late 2014, we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes, as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together. It's doubling every 18 months now. This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts. A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in? Who do I vote for? Do I take this job or that one? These are the decisions that require correct judgments about many different kinds of facts. If we have those facts at our mental fingertips, we're going to be able to make informed decisions. If, on the other hand, we need to look them all up, we may be in trouble. According to a National Geographic survey I just saw, somewhere along the lines of 80 percent of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map. If you can't do that first step, are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy? Quite probably not. At some point you're just going to be like, "You know what? There's too much to know. Screw it." And you'll make a less informed decision.
Den anden ting er fordelen af den tid man har hvis man har alle disse ting i fingerspidserne. Jeg tænker altid på historien om en lille pige der hedder Tilly Smith. Hun var en tiårig pige fra Surrey, England der var på ferie med hendes forældre for et par år siden i Phuket, Thailand. En morgen på stranden løber hun op til dem og siger, "Mor, far, vi skal væk fra stranden." Og de siger, "Hvad mener du? Vi er først lige kommet." Og hun sagde, "Sidste måned i Mr. Kearneys geografi time, fortalte han os at når tidevandet pludselig forsvinder ud i havet og man ser at bølgerne krøller helt derude, så er det et tegn på en tsunami, og man skal væk fra stranden." Hvad ville man gøre hvis ens 10 årige datter kommer hen til en og fortæller det? Hendes forældre tænkte over det, og til slut, til deres ære, besluttede de sig for at tro på hende. De fortalte livredderen at de ville tilbage til hotellet, og og livredderen fik mere end 100 mennesker væk fra stranden, heldigvis, fordi det var dagen tsunamien dagen efter jul, 2004, der dræbte tusindevis af mennesker i sydøstasien og rundt omkring det indiske ocean. Men ikke på den strand, ikke på Mai Khao Beach, fordi denne lille pige havde husket et af de faktum som hendes geografi lærer havde lært hende en måned forinden.
The other issue is the advantage of time that you have if you have all these things at your fingertips. I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith. She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand. She runs up to them on the beach one morning and says, "Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach." And they say, "What do you mean? We just got here." And she said, "In Mr. Kearney's geography class last month, he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea and you see the waves churning way out there, that's the sign of a tsunami, and you need to clear the beach." What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this? Her parents thought about it, and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her. They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel, and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily, because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami, the day after Christmas, 2004, that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean. But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach, because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before.
Når fakta er lige ved hånden på den måde -- Jeg elsker den historie fordi det viser magten ved et faktum, et faktum der blev husket på præcis det rigtige sted på det rigtige tidspunkt -- normalt noget der er nemmere at se på game shows end i virkeligheden. Men i dette tilfælde skete det i virkeligheden. Og det sker hele tiden i virkeligheden. Det er ikke altid en tsunami, tit er det en social begivenhed. Det er et møde eller en ansættelsessamtale eller en første date eller et forhold der bliver smurt fordi to mennesker bliver klar over at de deler et stykke viden. Man fortæller hvor man kommer fra, og jeg siger "Nå ja." Eller ens universitet eller ens job, og jeg ved en lille smule om det, nok til at få bolden til at rulle. Folk elsker den delte forbindelse der opstår når nogen ved noget om en. Det er som om de tog sig tiden til at lære en at kende inden de mødte en. Det er tit fordelen ved tiden. Og det er ikke effektivt hvis man siger, "Jamen, vent et øjeblik. Du kommer fra Fargo, North Dakota. Lad mig se hvad der popper op. Nå ja. Roger Maris kom fra Fargo." Det fungerer ikke. Det er bare irriterende. (Latter)
Now when facts come in handy like that -- I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact, one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time -- normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life. But in this case it happened in real life. And it happens in real life all the time. It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation. It's a meeting or job interview or first date or some relationship that gets lubricated because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge. You say where you're from, and I say, "Oh, yeah." Or your alma mater or your job, and I know just a little something about it, enough to get the ball rolling. People love that shared connection that gets created when somebody knows something about you. It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met. That's often the advantage of time. And it's not effective if you say, "Well, hold on. You're from Fargo, North Dakota. Let me see what comes up. Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo." That doesn't work. That's just annoying. (Laughter)
Den store teolog og tænker i det 18. århundrede, ven med Dr. Johnson, Samuel Parr, sagde engang, "Det er altid bedre at vide noget end ikke at vide det." Og hvis jeg har levet mit liv efter en eller anden form for motto, så er det det. Jeg har altid troet på de ting vi ved -- at viden er et absolut gode, at de ting vi har lært og bærer med os i vores hoveder er det der gør os til den vi er, som individer og som art. Jeg ved ikke om jeg vil leve i en verden hvor viden er overflødig. Jeg vil ikke leve i en verden hvor den kulturelle kompetence er blevet erstattet af disse små bobler af specielle ting, så ingen af os kender til de fælles associationer som plejede at binde vores civilisation sammen. Jeg vil ikke være den sidste paratviden-kender der sidder på et bjerg et eller andet sted, og fremsiger hovedstader og navnene på "Simpsons" episoder for sig selv og teksten til Abba sange. Det er som om vores civilisation fungerer når dette er en stor kulturel arv, som vi alle deler, og det ved vi uden at skulle outsource det til vores apparater, til vores søgemaskiner og vores smartphones.
The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson, Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it." And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that. I have always believed that the things we know -- that knowledge is an absolute good, that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads are what make us who we are, as individuals and as a species. I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete. I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced by these little bubbles of specialty, so that none of us know about the common associations that used to bind our civilization together. I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all sitting on a mountain somewhere, reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of "Simpsons" episodes and the lyrics of Abba songs. I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices, to our search engines and our smartphones.
I filmene, når computere som Watson begynder at tænke, ender tingene ikke altid godt. De film handler aldrig om smukke utopier. Det er altid en terminator eller en matrix eller en astronaut der bliver suget ud af en luftsluse i "Rumrejsen år 2001." Det går altid grueligt galt. Og jeg har det som om vi nu er på det punkt hvor vi skal træffe det valg om hvilken slags fremtid vi vil leve i. Dette er et spørgsmål om lederskab, fordi det bliver et spørgsmål om hvem der leder fremtiden. På den ene side, kan vi vælge mellem en ny gylden tidsalder, hvor information universelt er mere tilgængeligt end det nogensinde har været i den menneskelige historie, hvor vi alle har svarene på vores spørgsmål på fingerspidserne. Og på den anden side, har vi potentialet til at komme til at leve i en dyster utopi hvor maskinerne har taget over og vi har alle besluttet at det ikke er vigtigt hvad vi alle ved mere, viden er ikke værdifuldt fordi det er alt sammen der ude i skyen, og hvorfor skulle vi nogensinde bekymre os med at lære noget nyt.
In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think, things don't always end well. Those movies are never about beautiful utopias. It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in "2001." Things always go terribly wrong. And I feel like we're sort of at the point now where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in. This is a question of leadership, because it becomes a question of who leads the future. On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age where information is more universally available than it's ever been in human history, where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips. And on the other hand, we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia where the machines have taken over and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore, that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud, and why would we ever bother learning anything new.
Det er de to valgmuligheder vi har. Jeg ved hvilken fremtid jeg helst vil leve i. Og vi kan alle træffe det valg. Vi træffer det valg ved at være nysgerrige og spørgende mennesker der kan lide at lære, der ikke bare siger, "Jamen, så snart klokken har ringet og timen er forbi, behøver jeg ikke at lære mere." eller "Tak skæbne for at jeg har mit diplom. Jeg har lært nok i dette liv. Jeg behøver ikke at lære nye ting mere." Nej, hver dag bør vi stræbe efter at lære noget nyt. Vi bør have denne uslukkelige nysgerrighed for verden omkring os. Det er der hvor folkene man ser på Jeopardy kommer fra. Disse alvidende, de er Rainman-agtige lærde der sidder hjemme og lærer telefonbogen udenad. Jeg har mødt mange af dem. I det store hele, er de bare almindelige mennesker der er almindeligt interesserede i verden omkring dem, nysgerrige på det hele, tørstige efter denne viden om hvilket som helst emne.
Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in. And we can all make that choice. We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn, who don't just say, "Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over, I don't have to learn anymore," or "Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime. I don't have to learn new things anymore." No, every day we should be striving to learn something new. We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us. That's where the people you see on "Jeopardy" come from. These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants sitting at home memorizing the phone book. I've met a lot of them. For the most part, they are just normal folks who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything, thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject.
Vi kan leve i en af de to verdener. Vi kan leve i en verden hvor vores hjerne, de ting vi ved, fortsætter med at være den ting der gør os specielle, eller en verden hvor vi har udliciteret al det til onde supercomputere fra fremtiden som Watson. Mine damer og herrer, valget er jeres.
We can live in one of these two worlds. We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know, continue to be the thing that makes us special, or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson. Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours.
Mange tak.
Thank you very much.