After yet another convincing defeat, Ken Jennings, the winningest human Jeopardy player of all time, could be seen wringing the mock neck of Watson’s avatar. The machine had prevailed, having left its human contenders with nary a chance or a hope.Amidst the eerie ambience of this landmark victory, several questions remain unanswered. Watson, IBM promises, is a quantum jump in artificial intelligence and in light of victory served in such dominating fashion, it's hard to be skeptical of their claims. But what does this accomplishment truly represent?The fearmongers will have you believe that this is further evidence that SkyNET is upon us, but premonitions of a robot rebellion remain premature. For all of Watson's ability, he – or rather it – remains a tool and for now, the master servant equilibrium stays intact. Others, like Ray Kurzweil, provide a more harmonic approach. Instead of a clash, we will instead seamlessly merge with the machine, hints of that transformation made evident by the evergrowing prevalence of pedestrians with phones attached to their hands.Instead of worrying of either scenario, either the cynical or the obsessive, it may serve better to focus on what Watson has to offer and the potentially evolutionary developments of this revolutionary milestone.Watson is special not because of the stacks of servers that power its brain but rather the algorithms that drive its process. What IBM has demonstrated is a powerful message – that even those aspects of our being that we consider fundamentally human can be broken down into probabilistic objectives.The 90's saw the dawn of the Information Age, and what Watson embodies is a truly unique tool to finally disseminate all of that noise. IBM's moral fiber division will have you think that the main beneficiaries of such technology will be the medical industry, but I can see a whole slew of financiers itching to get their hands on this modern day reverse multiVAX.The future lies in the hands of those with the most information dexterity. Watson is a key piece of that puzzle. It would also be naive to assume that IBM's technology is the only player. Let's not forget the biggest contender in the arena, Google, plus the government heavy hitters.What IBM has is an immense taste for cultural impact and credit goes to their PR team because whereas Eric Schmidt prefers to lurk in the shadows amongst the geeks, Big Blue took it close to home, capturing the hearts of the mainstream audience.This is not to take away from what they've done. Whereas beating chess grandmasters always seemed a task perfectly suited for the emotionless machines with the games inherent limitations, Watson's ability to understand natural language was astonishing and unprecedented. Even the machine’s enunciation of “staggering genius” for the Dave Eggers clue made it sound like it was in on the joke. How long before they can fool us into thinking that they're human?And just as Watson decimated chess into irrelevance (has anyone cared about Garry Kasparov since?), Alex Trebek may finally have his excuse to retire. A muted Jennings could only accept the moment, leaving an explicit message under his Final Jeopardy response."I for one welcome our new computer overlords."
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