This month marked another milestone in game show history. On February 14-16, Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter defended their trivial supremacy against Watson, a computer program created by IBM. Drawing on vast stores of information and a complex algorithm for selecting the most probable answer, Watson all but ran the board on its way to a $1 million prize for IBM, which the company pledged to donate to charity. Yet the hype around Watson’s victory obscured a more important contest—that between humans and our ability to understand our own technology—and we’re not doing so well in that one, either. (more…)