tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32053362.post5554882979402673326..comments2024-03-26T00:25:34.026-04:00Comments on Not Running a Hospital: Big data, big dealPaul Levyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17065446378970179507noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32053362.post-6355630935040789602015-10-17T07:31:53.181-04:002015-10-17T07:31:53.181-04:00Love the advice, Bruce!Love the advice, Bruce!Paul Levyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17065446378970179507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32053362.post-10040736424365242572015-10-17T02:29:20.003-04:002015-10-17T02:29:20.003-04:00There's no doubt IBM is overselling; that'...There's no doubt IBM is overselling; that's what IBM and most other tech vendors do. It's been their M.O. for at least 50 years. One has to be fairly naïve to uncritically buy any technology silver bullet (including Watson), but IBM has long since extracted their customers' naiveté along with large sums of money—often more than once. There have been few uncritical buyers for a long time. This doesn't apply solely to IBM, of course; most tech companies oversell. <br /><br />But don't throw baby Watson out with the bathwater. It's a ridiculously fast, highly capable search engine that can draw very good (if limited) conclusions about a domain of knowledge and it will keep improving. That's all it does, but even that can be highly useful. Kelly and Dreyfus (the guest authors of the cited Stanley Fish column) seem to be saying "If it ain't human it's crap!" (apologies to Mike Myers) and that's just, well, crap.<br /><br />Watson can have many uses without actually thinking/feeling/caring or whatever "uniquely human" characteristic one chooses to enable tautological victory over the machines.<br /><br />However, medicine does pose an interesting challenge for Watson. It will surely become more knowledgeable than any human physician can be (even if it doesn't actually "know" anything), and to the extent that good diagnoses (for example) depend on factual knowledge and the ability to draw fairly simple conclusions it will become much better at presenting all the viable diagnostic options for a particular case. <br /><br />Of course, people aren't merely a bundle of symptoms (though we probably all know a counterexample or two) and it will be a long time before Watson can make use of all the non-medical stimuli a human can. One of the themes in current AI thinking is that the body is important, but I'm not sure how many of us would hope for a chance encounter with Watson at, say, the grocery store simply to improve its diagnostic ability. But differences will fade as sensor technology improves and health records become more complete. <br /><br />Further, we know very little about medicine or the human body, so Watson's ability to sift through orders of magnitude more data than a human actually confers less of an advantage than one might hope. I'd expect it to surface more alternatives for diagnosis, especially in less common conditions that a human physician can't keep up with. The glacially slow pace of knowledge diffusion is frustrating and there's value to offering a longer list of diagnostic possibilities that free a human to do some real thinking—and to watch out for the "screamer" mentioned in the article (where Watson identified Toronto as a US city).<br /><br />So my advice is to find a wealthy, naïve friend and borrow their Watson when they aren't using it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32053362.post-54363421121900648162015-10-14T09:45:27.889-04:002015-10-14T09:45:27.889-04:00Although you'd have a hard time convincing me ...Although you'd have a hard time convincing me that Watson can think, one thing it does seem to do particularly well is stringent literature review and summary. So as an input into the decision making process, one where we'd ideally like it to be data driven, it seems like Watson has a clear role in retrieving, organizing existing, and developing a baseline rational better than a document search. I doubt we can attribute IBM's business troubles to Watson, or blame it for not helping IBM out, the box can analyze data, but it doesn't (yet?) have a seat on the board.JPhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15103261513049537126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32053362.post-52787917789660689102015-10-13T12:03:19.096-04:002015-10-13T12:03:19.096-04:00I hope somebody from IBM high enough up to make a ...I hope somebody from IBM high enough up to make a difference reads your blog. They made a big mistake when they went the Watson route. They developed a product based on brute force. It reminds me of the story of Richard Lionheart and Saladin. At a meeting of the two before a battle Richard took his sword and split and anvil in two to demonstrate his strength. Saladin tossed a silk scarf in the air and extended the blade of his saber. The scarf floated downward across the blade and fell to the floor in two pieces. IBM’s Watson is Richard. The future calls for Saladin. I don’t think they can turn on that particular dime. Samnoreply@blogger.com