Distrust by Smith Gary;

Author:Smith, Gary; [Gary Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2023-02-14T09:32:36+00:00

Dr. Watson

In the popular media, robots are generally smarter—much smarter—than humans, including doctors and nurses. In the movie Big Hero 6, for example, Baymax is a lovable super hero and all-knowing healthcare provider that has been programmed to have the feelings and emotions of its creator’s father. In real life, instead of Baymax, we have IBM’s Watson, which has no feelings or emotions and is little more than a sometimes-helpful record keeper.

Soon after Watson defeated the best human Jeopardy players, IBM boasted that Watson would revolutionize healthcare. An IBM Senior Vice President for Cognitive Solutions and Research boasted that “Watson can read all of the healthcare texts in the world in seconds, and that’s our first priority, creating a ‘Dr. Watson,’ if you will.” Yes, Watson can store more data and retrieve data faster than any doctor. The unwarranted assumption is that data-mining algorithms can come up with the best diagnoses and treatments and even discover new diagnoses and treatments.

There are good reasons for skepticism. The practice of medicine is much more than storing, retrieving, and mining data. Computer algorithms have no effective way of separating the best research papers from the thousands of so-so papers and garbage. Nor do they have any reliable way of recognizing when previously reported results have been reversed by subsequent studies.

Computer algorithms also struggle with complex medical conditions involving multiple health problems which are the norm in the real world, particularly with elderly patients. Dr. Watson would not know the practical relevance of a retrieved study of the benefits and side effects of one medication on one disease.

So, how has it worked out? Have computer data-mining algorithms replaced doctors? Shortly after Watson’s Jeopardy win, the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston began employing Watson, accompanied by great hope and hype. A story headlined “IBM supercomputer goes to work at MD Anderson” began

First he won on Jeopardy!, now he’s going to try to beat leukemia. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center announced Friday that it will deploy Watson, IBM’s famed cognitive computing system, to help eradicate cancer.

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