If A New Jersey Congressman Can Beat Watson Are We Out of Jeopardy?

I sleep till afternoon these days, trying to get as much rest as I can to save up my energy for the coming of the killer machines. There will be no time to sleep then. With their spinning blade hands and little electric mouths chasing us up and down the Brooklyn waterfront. Manhattan will be Machinetown entirely by then (when I say “by then” I mean by August or so). That’s why Manhattan is almost completely ATMs. Killer Machines Eat Money. And Crap out Human Heads. Our only hope is that God will dispatch an angel brigade to help us fight them. It’s all in my screenplay. Pregnant Natalie Portman will play all the Brutal Machines. And God is Queen Latifah.

So what do I make of the news that a human, a congressman from New Jersey has defeated the Great Clairvoyant IBM Toaster Watson? On the surface of it, it’s heartening. I may stop cutting myself for a few days. Rep. Rush Holt is apparently a nuclear scientist, as all New Jerseyians have to be to survive the polluted Post-Apocalyptic Horrorscape that is the Modern New Jersey. They only played single Jeopardy against the machine. If our hero Rush has been given more time, he might have found the best place to stuff a nuclear grenade into Watson’s gears. Like the softball-sized hole that was the flaw that helped us defeat the Death Star in 1977, we can only hope that Watson has an air vent that goes directly to its power core. IBM guys are pretty stupid. As opposed to Google and Facebook people, who are all billionaires. If you’re not smart enough to be a billionaire, I wouldn’t want you creating my Killer Microwave with arms at Evil Corp.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Rep. Holt was only able to beat the damned thing in one round. There’s no video of the event that I’ve seen yet. There might have been a category that Watson didn’t understand in its whirling death knowledge, yet. Like “PLACES LADIES LIKE TO BE TOUCHED.” Or “URINATING STANDING UP.” When Watson has no idea, he doesn’t ring in. Allowing the human players, for the first time in the game, to ring the buzzer and actually get called on by the host. Ken Jennings had reverence for the Watson. And actually came to love it, and craved it to beat him over and over again at the game he once mastered. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords” he wrote during the final Final Jeopardy. He wrote this in the hopes that Electronic Death would not come down on him bloody during the Coming Bloody Reboot. So maybe those Jeopardy players broke the ice for future challengers like Rush Holt. We don’t expect to win, like Rocky didn’t expect to win against Mr. T. the second time. And that’s what made him freer to win.

Beating Watson in one round definitely sets the Machines back a few weeks in their plans to be our Sovereign Dictators. Rush Holt’s credit cards will be frozen. He will be chased in the street by one of those Google no-driver black vans. And the Evil Computer Army will take him apart tendon by tendon to see what gives him the gall to stand against them. And he’ll be replaced by an exact duplicate robot. If he’s not a robot already! Were they trying to give humanity some false hope, lulling us into a false sense of security that Watson is not smarter than us. And we should just get fat and complacent until they are in place to release the Impotence Ray? That thing is going to Fucking Suck by the way. I already have enough of a hard time whipping myself into a frenzy. I don’t need some humming purple ray to make it damn near impossible.

Humans, have Guarded Hope today. I knew that once they took the Cheating Machine on the road there would be ups and downs. But, just like the Miami Heat, their time to conquer is soon at hand. It’s the inevitability of the thing that makes it all the more insidious. Let’s hope the new wise and evil emotional Flying Devices will find some of us Sexually Attractive after they conquer and become more aware. Maybe they will let us be their sex slaves. We salute you, possible-human-but- also-possible-robot-mole Rep. Rush Holt. Tomorrow I might be able to wake up before noon, thinking of your dominating intellect. Next time you’re up close to it, find the fucking Off Switch, man! Commander Data’s was like right on his shoulderblade!

Photo credit: IBM