There is much excitement in recent victory in Jeopardy from Watson. Watson is the IBM’s DeepQA natural language processing machine
which can process through a large database and provide a most probable answer in a question.
It is a great feat in programming and narrow artificial intelligence.
What holds more interest than the victory itself of a machine over Jeopardy champions is the field action such a machine can provide.
One of the first applications that Watson will be tested is in medical diagnosis. Just watch the video below to see the perspective from mother company and the hospital that will test it.
The use of artificial intelligence in medical diagnosis has been treated with great hostility from doctors and patients (just watch the comments in youtube for the video above to take a glimpse into it). Surely a trained doctor can assess a patient in a way a computer can not do it (at least yet). What computers are good at is processing huge amount of data and reach to a most probable conclusion. This is a great advantage since current diagnosis is based on huge amount of data such as X-rays, CTs, MRIs journal publications, genetic and laboratory data from blood samples.
This is where Watson could offer great help as an assistant in dealing with the huge amount of data that currently flood our low memory retention carbon minds. I doubt if any time soon an artificial intelligence will surpass us in our approach to patient’s exam; nevertheless it could help us surpass our greatest limitation as “carbon based machines”: We cannot go through huge amounts of data and retain them efficiently.
So colleagues, please don’t hurt Watson, he is here to help. How much you trust him will depend on his credibility on field work, just like we are tested everyday…
Welcome to our world of responsibility over lives Watson. I hope you will help us save more of them.
