Everyone agrees health care in
the United States is a colossal mess, and IBM is betting that artificially
intelligent supercomputers are just what the doctor ordered. But some health
professionals say robodoctors are just flashy toys. Such are the deep questions
raised by the medical incarnation of Watson, the language-processing,
information-hunting AI that debuted in 2011 on the quiz show Jeopardy!,
annihilating the best human player ever and inspiring geek dreams of where its
awesome computational power might be focused next.
IBM has promised a Watson that
will in microseconds trawl the world’s medical knowledge and advise doctors. It
sounds great in principle, but the project hasn’t yet produced peer-reviewed
clinical results, and the journey from laboratory to bedside is long. Still,
some doctors say Watson will be fantastically useful. It’s not humanly possible
to practice the best possible medicine. We need machines, researchers said from
a clinical medicine at Columbia University. A machine with massively parallel
processing is like having 500,000 people trying to find the right information.
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