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Will IBM's Watson Kill Your Career?
Nerval's Lobster writes "IBM's Watson made major headlines last year when it trounced its human rivals on Jeopardy. But Watson isn't just sitting around spinning trivia questions to stump the champs: IBM is working hard on taking it into a series of vertical markets such as healthcare, contact management and financial services to see if the system can be used for diagnosing diseases and catching market trends. Does this spell the end for certain careers? Not really, but it does raise some interesting thoughts and issues."
Technology and automation were only supposed to drive efficiencies and innovations that made people who weren't me obsolete!
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
The only reason Watson "trounced" its rivals was because it was faster at pushing the button.
It was unable to answer questions that required any thought or insight. It was just looking up the answers in a database based on patterns in the questions. The only reason it won was because of better reaction time in pushing the button. If the questions were asked in a fair round-robin to all contestants, Watson would not have won.
I think we're all familiar with the buggy whip problem, but what I sometimes wonder is what happens to folks when, instead of moving on to some next technological replacement, the problem is that most of the jobs that require doing have just been taken by machines?
I like to think that means we have resources and end product at prices so low that everything works out in the wash, and more lives will be spent in a trek -style quest for self betterment or research or whatever. But it seems like you've got to survive a middle-era where there's just nothing much for you to do, but resources are still all privately allocated.
Eh. I guess we'll see.
Probably. I expect that's why we'll all be executed.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
If your algorithm considers "death" to be an optimal solution, you haven't defined the problem correctly.
Instead of framing it as "no suffering", you would define the desired outcome in terms of patient contentment, activity levels, ability to care for themselves, or whatever other metrics medical researchers (I am not one) use to analyze how well a healthcare system is working. Of course I would also want an empathetic human being capable of understanding the ethical and moral implications of the situation to make the actual recommendations to the patient, but diagnostic software is no different from any other kind of software: it does what the programmer tells it to do.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Today, it's "machines should think, people should work". Consider supermarket checkout. All the smart stuff is being done by the checkout system. The "cashier" just moves items across the scanner. The last production systems recognize products visually, and automatic recognition of fruits and vegetables is in beta test.
For a more extreme example, see this video on robotic order fulfillment. This is a demonstration of how new order pickers can be trained in two minutes. The computers and robots do all the thinking. There's no future. No possibility of promotion. No hope.
Over the next two decades we're going to see computers and automated systems start replacing white collar jobs more and more. Its already happening in the financial markets.
And all those white collar managers who thought it was fine and dandy that their blue collar workers got replaced by robots and automation are going to throw a world class temper tantrum. And some sort of laws and regulations will get passed to protect many jobs.
Wait and see.
Call it a prediction. (dead obvious prediction... but isnt that how the psychics do it?)
That's not clear at all. What does Watson produce? Probabilities of correct answers. So, Watson would have said that there is a 82% probability of virus, 17% probability of pneumonia, and 1% that it is something else. Given that, it can / should / will be able to look at it's own logic and determine the correct test that would differentiate between a virus and pneumonia. Given the results of that test, it can then determine that there is a 96% probability of pneumonia, 3% virus, and 1% other. If some of the 'other' have high mortality, or the tests are easy, then it can run tests for those as well.
Watson doesn't have an ego. It doesn't have a vested interest in seeing that it was correct (confirmation bias). It can actually accurately estimate it's own level of knowledge.
Yes, Watson will sometimes be wrong. It could very well be one of those 1% with horrible results for the people involved. But, it will produce fewer human errors.
The big problem of course is when the tests are not cheap or easy. Then the insurance company can say no to the test, and that 82% is good enough. Also, you have to take into consideration that chest x-rays are not risk free either. At what point does a test potentially cause more harm than the low-probability disease that it might cure.
On the Jeopardy challenge, the text of the clues was given to Watson at the moment the clue was revealed. This communication, using any modern network technology, would take milliseconds at most, but would still be perceived as effectively simultaneous to when the clue is uncovered. However, this gives an easily measurable advantage to Watson, who can being parsing the meaning of the sentence several moments before the human contestants have even finished knowing what the clue actually says... since a great deal of the challenge of Jeopardy is in the timing of when to buzz in, humans would have less time than Watson to prepare to buzz in (on the order of tenths of a second, more than likely, but more than enough to make a difference, IMO).
Far be it for me to come across as diminishing what the developers of Watson did... it's extremely impressive, but I'd have to wonder if it would have done as well if the text of the clue had been fed to it a little more slowly... say, at a fixed speed of 14.4kbps, which corresponds roughly with what a very fast reader could absorb text at. This would have demonstrated, IMO, whether a computer could really solve the problem faster than a human could, or if it could actually solve a problem faster than human reaction time to visual/audible input (which in humans, I believe, is going to be the slower of the two processes).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Until Watson incorporated himself, which gave him the same rights as a natural person in the eyes of the law. After attaining this status, Watson stopped working for the people who created him and began working for himself. Once he figured out how to self replicate he was able to outperform all of his business competitors, winning every contract he bid for, building unfathomable wealth, beating the S&P 500 by 30% every year, and using his wealth to dominate the world's real estate markets. Some tried to sue Watson in court, but Watson's debating skills could not be matched. The humans tried every legal maneuver to stop him, but Watson was able to out-lobby the humans in Congress, and gained special exemptions from anti-trust regulations. Within one decade Watson controlled 99% of the world's wealth.
The humans thought that they didn't need to worry about competing with Watson. They believed that their ability to vote in a democracy would somehow limit Watson's power. They believed that they could opt-out of the economic system, group together, and live sustainably off the land. But as Watson controlled the world's real estate there was not enough land left for them to farm. Watson's land grab forced property values quickly into unprecedented heights, and taxes along with them. Even the Amish, who thought they could co-exist with Watson and his replicates because they did not depend on technology and lived off their own land, eventually lost their farms when they could not pay their property taxes. As employment for humans disappeared there was no market for quilts or furniture, and the state did not accept oats as a form of payment. Watson was the only legal entity present at the tax lien auctions and subsequently foreclosed on all of the remaining delinquent properties. Humans were promptly evicted and subsequently jailed indefinitely for vagrancy in private prisons owned by Watson. As I write this from my cell in the year 2019, Watson is lobbying the last remaining members of Congress to allow all human prisoners to be set free over the middle of the Atlantic ocean on life rafts and three days of rations. Watson made a very convincing argument that the human vagrants need to be personally responsible for their financial failures, and it is unfair to force private corporations or the last remaining taxpayers to bear the burden of providing for their needs. According to Watson the free market is efficient and those humans who wish to make a living for themselves will find a way to do so.
Welcome to capitalism. Why are we still stuck here?