To Erase or Not?


Watson, the artificial intelligence computer, is old news: but in case you didn’t know, it was developed by IBM and can answer questions posed in natural language (aka human speak). Watson shot to fame back in 2011, when it competed on the US game show, Jeopardy, against 2 former winners and won. That should give you an idea of how good it is.

Obviously, Watson has a massive repository of both structured and unstructured content that it refers to. The IBM team then attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary, an online dictionary meant for “slang or ethnic culture words, phrases, and phenomena not found in standard dictionaries.” Soon the researchers discovered that Watson couldn’t distinguish polite language v/s profanity! So they decided to delete the Urban Dictionary from its memory.

Nicholas Carr didn’t approve the decision to delete items from memory and wrote the following lines:
“I know that God takes a lot of heat for giving us the capacity for sin, but I give Him a lot of credit for that decision. It must have taken a lot of courage to let His creations look into the Urban Dictionary and remember what they saw.”

I so disagree with that. Why is it OK for a good person who has the power to set things right to instead look away? Besides, to allow people to sin is one thing; to allow them to inflict unimaginable suffering on others (torture, rape, mass killings etc) is not just about allowing sin, it is also about allowing the suffering of others, many of whom are totally innocent.

Methinks that the creator’s act didn’t take much of “courage” as Carr calls it; it only took monumental stupidity, callousness and a willingness to condone evil. Or if you find that’s too harsh, maybe you’d prefer Al Pacino’s more humorous/scathing way of saying it from the movie, Devil’s Advocate:
“God's your prankster, my boy. Think of it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift and then, I swear to you -- for his own amusement -- his own private, cosmic gag reel -- he sets the rules in opposition. It's the goof of all time. Look but don't touch. Touch but don't taste. Taste but don't swallow. And while you're jumping from one foot to the other he's laughing his sick fucking ass off!”

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