If Science Fiction has taught anything, it's that 'Big AI' isn't evil unless it has red eyes.
IBM has spent twenty years and billions of dollars promoting Watson as their flagship "next act" product technology. In particular, they have been very publicly promoting its future use for clinical-level health care in the mass market.
IBM has made itself the world-wide face of "Big AI," and now their flagship technology has been called "a piece of shit" by an MD who has had hands-on contact with it in the clinical environment.
This story is the technological equivalent of what accountants call a "going concern" letter. It means that IBM and MSK are intellectually bankrupt, without credibility. The language in the "internal documents" is absolutely damning: "multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations." Katie, bar the door, there's going to be a stampede.
IBM has been telling the biggest health-care providers in the world that they are going to be the dominant player in robot-delivered health care going into the 21st Century. They have also been telling the FDA and other regulatory agencies that they have the answer to delivering high-quality, low-cost advanced-technology health care at the clinical level, world-wide. In partnering with Memorial Sloane-Kettering, they have involved what is arguably the most prestigious name in cancer care in the world with their main corporate initiative.
They have also been telling Wall Street analysts and institutional investors that they're going to lead the world with this technology.
Heads are going to roll. Watch what happens in the next few weeks.
The Rise of the Machines — they will seek to wipe us out as a virus upon the planet.
Based on my experiences with Lotus Notes, I have little faith in IBM.
If Science Fiction has taught anything, it's that 'Big AI' isn't evil unless it has red eyes.
For the foreseeable future, AI will be great at memorizing and pattern matching.
It’s no substitute for reasoning, intuition , and common F’n sense.
I guess that makes AI the ticket for Progressive Liberal Democrats.
Good old IBM. Without them, or something EXACTLY like them, Hitler and the Nazis could NOT have accomplished all their evil.
Ho, ho! It WAS an actual recommendation. It may not have been based on an actual person, but it most definitely was an actual recommendation.
AI can be helpful, but cannot replace human knowledge and thinking.
No heads are going to roll. Welcome to Big Data medical. Mostly right is good enough. The world is changing forever.
No matter how modern or fast the processor, it all boils down to GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out.
I think this is a junk hit piece. How much worst is Watson compared to humans? AI is the future for medicine and no millinial punk at Gizmodo is going to change that fact.
Nothing, zilch, nada will come from this piece of junk and the zero-sum author will continue to write crap for decades.
My first experience with AI was back in about 1989. It was supposed to be a Decision Support System. In 2009, after millions and millions of dollars and uncounted and countless man-years of effort by many users and developers it maybe began to bear fruit but not the way it was envisioned.
The next system was supposed to fully automate pipe handling on drilling rigs. It worked but instead of rig floor labor we had to add more high cost instrument and electronics technicians but we still had to have the rig floor crew. The systems got more complex and required more maintenance. The rig floor also did not become any safer from what I could see. Men who got in the way of the machines just got killed instead of injured.
Next example was a book called, “How Doctor’s Think” it was written by a guy on a team at Johns Hopkins as I recall after a failed decision support system project for telemedicine or something like that. The book sought to learn and explain how good doctors are good doctors. The conclusion was that they had experience, a knack for being good doctors and good judgement.
Good judgement is one thing AI can’t have because good judgement involves not only experience but a feel for the people involved at every level and technically irrelevant conditions that have bearing on good diagnostics and decisions. I think this is why the AI people I have dealt with usually fold to calling what they do a Decision Support System.
Automation has its place but I’m still not so sure abut AI. Finding enough people with good skills, experience, judgement and consistency is hard. Hard enough to keep people searching for ways to replace or create these people with AI. Some think it is the easy way to training up good people.
A computer program does exactly what the instructions tell it to do. Problem is, the designers don’t foresee what the outcome will be. The program will continue to produce stupid output until it is stopped, and fixed.
No computer program is equivalent to the human mind. The human mind is self-correcting and able to “come to its senses “ and avoid really wrong output. Sometimes the self-correction fails— that is called insanity.
This would have been a latter phase of Obola care. Go down to the local pharmacy and have Watson diagnose your illness with an occasional treatment error programmed into the software to reduce the surplus population in politically red areas.
No. None of what you said is reality. Reality is most folks don’t know what the hell Watson is and don’t care. And it was never a sole source. There will be no stampede, they ARE going to be dominant players in robot delivered healthcare, and they actually DO have the answers for low cost advanced tech health care at the clinical level.
The fact is they’re in an empty field. Solving problems no one else is even trying to solve. No heads will roll, nothing at all interesting will happen in the next few weeks. It’s a big old non-event. The only people who even care read it and say “it has bugs, just like every other piece of software”.
I guess we won’t be seeing Larry Niven’s Autodocs any time soon.
Its not that big of a deal although some may lose their jobs over it.
They simply need to feed it accurate inputs rather than hypothetical garbage. The quality of neural net systems depends on the training, which means for the very best answers you need to put in extremely good and accurate input data. This is a given.
The author is clearly a government school graduate.
Maybe that's why they are “testing” it first?
I can report that AI identification of skin cancer - at the visual and microscopic level - is statistically equivalent to identification by dermatologists and pathologists.
I am not aware of any commercially available AI skin cancer software currently in use, but it is only a matter of time.
I will have no problem turning my health care over to AI, as long as I get a detailed written diagnosis, and I have access to high level medical information on the Web to double check.