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IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer as a Revolution in Cancer Care. It's Nowhere Close (statnews.com)
IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world three years ago. But is it really doing its job? Not so much. An investigation by Stat found that the supercomputer isn't living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM's goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care. From the report: The interviews suggest that IBM, in its rush to bolster flagging revenue, unleashed a product without fully assessing the challenges of deploying it in hospitals globally. While it has emphatically marketed Watson for cancer care, IBM hasn't published any scientific papers demonstrating how the technology affects physicians and patients. As a result, its flaws are getting exposed on the front lines of care by doctors and researchers who say that the system, while promising in some respects, remains undeveloped. [...] Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company's claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, "even new approaches" to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn't create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.
Why do you think it would do that? Being better at getting the right diagnosis quickly isn't going to make things any cheaper. If you think otherwise then you're probably just a deranged pot head or vegan kidding themselves.
A lot of cancers are rare and difficult to deal with. Your random guy at "General Hospital" is going to have no clue. He won't even know well enough to throw the $10K per month med at the patient.
PubMed on steroids could actually be quite useful for the average doctor who's not at a world leading treatment center like Mayo.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Except Mayo is not a 'world leading cancer treatment center'. It's one of literally thousands of places with excellent oncology teams.
Who look at the exact same data as Watson.
And come up with pretty much exactly the same result. Sans Watson.
The clueless doc at General Hospital doesn't even figure into this. If a patient has a complex / rare / difficult cancer they get referred to a regional cancer center. A lot of cancer treatments are pretty straightforward due to the large number of trials that have been done over the years. The databases have existed for decades and obviously are getting better and more complete over time. The real killer, so to speak, for Watson is that it could never really beat the industry standard 'tumor board' composed of various meat space biologic computers. Perhaps one day. When AI is actually a bit more than a marketing term.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When captains of industry are talking about cancer treatment in terms of "establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market", does any rational person believe we're going to have an actual cure for cancer any time soon?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
No. There is no such thing as "AI" (yet). It's possible but probably not within our lifetimes. It's taken us well over 30 years since functional MRI came into the market and we're just beginning to understand what general areas of the brain are involved in doing "something", let alone individual neurons and synapses.
To claim the ability to "create intelligence" when we don't even understand the question yet is hubris (and salesmanship) on the side of IBM. Trust me, there will be several boom-bust cycles before AI becomes 'intelligent'.
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Can you please spell out the whole words instead of the failed abbreviations.