Courtesy CNN
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$1,000,000 for 3 days work, this must be the right profession.
Answer: What is health care? Question: The industry IBM Corp.’s Watson is targeting after vanquishing its human opponents on the game show “Jeopardy!”
One day after the Watson computer defeated human champions in a three-day match, its creators and a Massachusetts software company are preparing to sell a medical version of the smart machine.
IBM has an agreement with Nuance Communications Inc. of Burlington to sell Watson-based products to health care providers. Nuance already offers voice-recognition software for a variety of applications. The companies are pitching forthcoming technology that will, among other things, allow medical providers to describe symptoms orally and get diagnostic information in return.
Watson, the result of four years of work by researchers at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was launched to test whether a computing system could rival a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed and accuracy.
He’d probably make a good lawyer as well.
Nobody, teach it to read lips!
I was at Disneyland today. Watson was there, too.
Boring. There is a reason it is called “trivia”.
Next week on a new episode of House(MD):
House: Ok, we’ve got an interesting case here, with a whole range of weird symptoms…
Hot female doctor: Umm, House? Watson just figured that one out — it was Lupus.
House: Uh, Ok, here’s another case…
Hot female doctor: Watson just diagnosed that one too: it was Amyloidosis.
House: dammit, ok, just take your top off.
The trial lawyer are going to have a lot of fun going after IBM if this idea is ever put into use.
Watson said you need surgery but you didn’t? Cha-ching!
Watson failed to diagnose your cancer? Cha-ching!
3-
I agree about quiz shows. Big deal.
Surely it will become more interesting, though, if /when they get uppity and start talking back to angry users (like Lily Tomlin’s “Ernestine” character).
“Computers seem to work better when yelled at”
– Jerry Pournelle
You hope.
This was a two-day cumulative match, with so much “how it was done” / IBM promotional material that it was spread out over three days. Under his answer in the final Final Jeopardy, Ken Jennings wrote “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
While a Watson type of artificial intelligence system would work under the “Code Napaleon” or in places where jurisprudence is strictly adhered to, it would not work in the United States, where the outcome of a trial is partially dependent on the price (and therefore presumed quality) of your lawyer.
If you can seriously have arguments in court over what the meaning is “is is, the legal system is an aleatory one and not amenable to mechanistic reduction.
In # 4 chuck made allusion to the TV show: House MD.
I have never figured out why that show was popular.
Its about a physician whose diagnostic skills are so terrible that he routinely manages to almost kill the patient twice or three times per show before settling in on the cause of the disease.
Basically, its a show about a guy with a bum leg who’s such a fuck up that he manages to scrape by and find a correct diagnosis the third time around.
He’s sort of like Microsoft that way.
Nothing they ever do manages to work acceptably in version 1.0, 2.0 or even 3.0.
It took until 3.11 for Windows to get accepted into doing government work.
P.S. Would you ever trust Microsoft with the kind of information, never mind making the diagnosis, that would be required for medical diagnostics.
P.P.S. There’s going to be a “walled garden kept around medical information used by Watson type AIs, in order to keep the spammers and quack doctors out of there.
Its supposedly for the good of the patient but its instead going to be very very good for the pocket books of the walled gardeners.
P.P.P.S. That’s the next investment advice I have to give you. (But I’ve been saying that since the mid to late ’80s when programs like MYCIN, E-MYCIN and CADUCEUS were already scoring better than human doctors at diagnosing patients. [With the explosion of medical information available now, I wouldn’t trust a mere human being to diagnose a boil on my ass.])
Bob in #5 made allusion to lawyers slavering at the mouth over the lawsuits that are going to fall out of this.
Sorry bob but there is no way that they will ever let any advice issued by a Watson type of AI go out without first getting signed off by an MD (who will eventually just be rubber-stamping any diagnostic conclusion arrived at by the system, [which will actually be made by a MYCIN/CADUCEUS AI through the application of a rule base with a complete audit trail of the diagnostic tree followed from the patients presentation, to treatment through, to patient referral/discharge/burial by someone outside the hospital/medical system.])
Watson is going to be a front-end system for physicians to use to let them dive into the already huge and much burgeoning databases of medical information, (only partially including some web-based content,) mediated by a MYCIN/CADUCEUS style AI to suggest a diagnosis and therapy.
Watson was not linked to the intarwebs during the taping of Jeopardy!
I might be linked to some sites when in actual operation.
“Contest” NOT FAIR !!! Watson should have had to have had a VOICE INPUT SYSTEM – like Dragon Naturally Speaking or IBM’s old Via Voice to hear the seme clues as the humans !!! That would have given the Humans a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD !!! Watson got TEXT Input and could press the button in only 10 MILLI-SEONDS – AGAIN NOT FAIR for the Humans – Saw Ken Jennings squirming when he knew the answer but was beat out by Watson’s quick trigger finger !!!
In #7 Uncle Patso said that Ken Jennings wrote under his final answer: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
Its not quite that bad. 😉
I remember one of the first times I saw Woody Allen on TV he quipped something to the effect:
Things are bad. My dad just got replaced at work by a computer. The worst thing is, my Mom bought one.
Bobkat in #13 said: “…my Mom bought one.
Its called a dildo.
Amazon carries a whole bunch of ’em. 🙂
Copied from my post on related thread at CageMatch:
News that Watson will be used to compete with docs for diagnosing illnesses. Very high brow application, but porn would make so much more money==as would providing cyber friends for shut-ins.
In fact, imagine this: the entire DU Blogsite is just Watson with 50 different sorted personalities responding to each contributor in a way to hook him into the website.
Yes, Watson: the precursor of Skynet. Its all forewarned: “Alex, I’ll take End of the Human Race for $1000: Who is Watson?”—ain’t called Jeopardy for nothing.
I’m not that impressed that a machine that is capable of buzzing in quickly beat people at Jeopardy. I wonder how the same clues connected to Google would have worked.
MineN you really don’t get it do you?
The medical profession is barely out of the hand-written note stage (in fact my doctor still writes all his notes by hand, [and you know how illegibly doctors write,]) so using a Watson is going to be a tough sell until a Nuance voice recognition system system is in front of it.
The databases that Watson needs to be connected to are miles removed from the general trivia that were demonstrated in this Jeopardy!™® game.
They are medical databases. (See my comment #9 above.)
bobbo, words have a meaning and a context said something demonstrating his utter ignorance.
Bobbo, go home, shower yourself in santorum and swallow.
I have rarely seen such a waste of electrons as your commments.
Really.
I’m not kidding.
You contribute nothing to the conversation.
I’m assuming Watson might be used as an input for nurses not doctors.