I watched Wednesday night’s episode of Jeopardy! with someone who’s a three-day winner and Tournament of Champions player — not to mention a staffer here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. A few of us switched it on in the office not to watch Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings, though he was a player that night, but to see Ken Jennings and another contestant, Brad Rutter, beat by a machine. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” the clever Jennings wrote underneath his (correct) answer in the final round. But should the rest of us?

I do wonder if we should be so certain we will one day be ruled by machines. Watson, a “supercomputer” developed by researchers at IBM and named after company founder Thomas J. Watson, certainly impressed viewers and won the match, earning $1 million to be split between two charities, World Community Grid and apparently, oddly enough, the Canadian arm of World Vision. But given a large database and the capacity to navigate it quickly, it seems no great accomplishment to beat a couple of humans. Google could, if the person seaching it could only type faster.