Originally posted Feb 2011
Jeopardy-playing robots are attempting to enter the medical field, and will terminate all human resistance.
IBM's Watson artificial intelligence program wowed the nation last Wednesday with a major victory against the quiz show's prima donna Ken Jennings, and Brad Rutter, holder of the record for most money won on the program. Jennings, in a moment of snark, forewent a Final Jeopardy answer for a reference to The Simpsons: “I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.” Medical interns may soon have reason to say the same thing, only without the sarcasm.
IBM has been partnering with Nuance Communications, producers of artificial intelligence software applications that read text and recognize speech, to retool Watson for use in making diagnoses. Doctors at Columbia University and University of Maryland are working to decide just how best Watson could help them. This is an amazing opportunity to quickly advance humans' ability to diagnose disease, but it could be frightening for those just entering the medical profession.
Will Watson put recent med school graduates out on the street? Jennings said, in an essay he wrote for Slate, “Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of "thinking" machines. "Quiz show contestant" may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last.” It's conceivable that a number of medical professionals may be afraid that they'll be next on the list.
Dr. Herbert Chase of Columbia doesn't think so: “My hunch is that [Watson] is going to be embraced...it is very painful...for a physician...to be aware of the information gaps they can't bridge, even using the most current, up-to-date technology,” he stated at a TED-sponsored discussion at IBM's research facility. David Ferrucci, the project's principal investigator, said, “[it] isn't about giving you the final and end-all answer.”
The consensus appeared to be that Watson provides a non-human value to a physician's judgment, rather than replacing doctors or assistants (the term Dr. Chase used was “Physician Support”). For doctors, answering their own questions is a very time intensive task, as research is the only cure for the inevitable gaps in professionals' medical knowledge. As Chase put it, “Humans are incapable of managing the opus.” Watson's gift to doctors, then, is to slash book-and-journal research time from hours to seconds.
As the “opus” increases to even more unwieldy sizes, technological research assistants are going to become more and more necessary. If humans want to maintain mastery over the tremendous amount of data in the world, they'll need machines that can read and recall at rates beyond our limited capacity. But these machines lack curiosity, the one area humans will eternally dominate.
No comments:
Post a Comment