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In 2003, IBM released a strange, THX 1138-inspired, creepy commercial dubbed “Prodigy.” It featured a vacuously staring blonde boy silently sucking up knowledge from people as diverse as an anonymous plumber, college basketball coaching legend John Wooden, a mustachioed Muhammad Ali, and comedic actress Penny Marshall. The commercial touted the open nature of Linux (to which I doubt any of the celebrities actually contributed much code). Had IBM waited, though, it would have represented a much more appropriate metaphor for Watson and other technologies associated with machine learning.