Every decision made by a company can be evaluated in the context of the culture that influenced that decision. The fact that Watson's babysitters got embarrassed when it learned a new word from the Internet says something about society, IBM, and the Internet.
Why couldn't they have Watson curse on national television? Cultural expectations. Why avoid any words at all? They're all just phonemes strung together with no inherent meaning.
Are you saying being unable to whore out to good, clean and 100% trivial family entertainment, is actually equivalent to killing people?
Why not have Watson investigate murder cases? Or even better, make sense of the words vs. actions of actual people holding power and influence right now? Why am I not holding my breath for this? Because it's hard, or because it's not ever going to be a priority in a million years?
Picasso was perfectly correct when he said "computers are useless, they only give answers". They could be useful, if we programmed them to give answers to interesting questions. But unfortunately most humans are useless as well; they don't ask any questions, ever.
To be honest, I realized you probably were halfway through my rant, but ranted anyway. I'm not sure if I would agree that "bad language" can do all that much damage, but I do agree that "it's just words" is generally not an argument.
What I was saying was that it's not a perspective on us not wanting a machine to reflect our language and how we us it back at us, as you originally said. It's just the normal clean decent image that companies prefer to present most of the time.
Why couldn't they have Watson curse on national television? Cultural expectations. Why avoid any words at all? They're all just phonemes strung together with no inherent meaning.
Not looking deeply is not looking at all.