What makes you sick? Ask Dr. Watson
Watson is IBM’s natural language artificial intelligence supercomputer that last year competed on the quiz show Jeopardy and consistently outperformed two record holding humans, one with the longest winning streak (74 wins), and one winning the most money. Watson can process 200 million times more instructions per second than all of the computers on the recently retired Space Shuttle.
In just 3 seconds, Watson was able to parse and analyze the equivalent of nearly 300 million books to find relevant information. For perspective, if those books were placed on a long bookshelf, the shelf would be longer than 7 football fields.
Watson in Healthcare
WellPoint is pioneering the use of Watson in healthcare, giving physicians better insight to help improve patient outcomes. (See infographic below.)
Related articles on Watson in Healthcare
- IBM’s Jeopardy-winning computer is delving into medicine
- Watson on Wikipedia
- Seven Questions With IBM’s Manoj Saxena About Watson and Cancer
Watson in Other Industries
The Infographic
IBM TRIES TO SELL WATSON HEALTH AGAIN (Axios, 1/5/2022) Here’s my response:
Sell Watson for 25 cents on the dollar? What a waste!
Impatience – I spent 30 years at IBM and saw many other examples of the company investing in promising markets only to exit later, essentially giving that market to its competition.
Relational Database – IBM invented it and the SQL language before Oracle took that over.
Personal Computers – IBM’s open architecture essentially created the PC market, resulting in dozens or hundreds of clones. But IBM forgot what made it great (innovation) and later started asking retailers like BestBuy what new features their next generation PCs should have. That meant they were getting the same advice as their clone competition and signaling the end of their ability to innovate.
ThinkPad – The company sold IBM PC Division but kept the ThinkPad brand, which included features coming out of IBM Research, including the TrackPoint pointing device and accelerometers that sense a PC falling and retracting disc arms to prevent contact with the disc surface upon impact with the ground. Then, of course, IBM sold ThinkPad to Lenovo, which continues as a major PC brand in the enterprise space that IBM coveted and once owned.
OS/2 – IBM spent millions developing this multitasking PC operating system and millions more to introduce OS/2 Warp for the consumer market. It realized corporate workers wanted to use the same operating system at home and work and would buy their home PC preloaded with Windows preinstalled. Yes, IBM also abandoned OS/2.
Consumer Division – After much prodding from sales teams close to the customer and understanding their needs, IBM created an entire division to delight the biggest influencer of corporate IT – the end user. That included an entry into the emerging Smart Home market with IBM Home Director. But even though the company had developed leading-edge technology, they sold it off and later Consumer Division too.
Research – Over and over I saw IBM waste millions or billions developing innovative technologies that often came from IBM Research before those strategic investments were later squandered by corporate bean counters. They apparently saw cutting expenses as the quickest way to raise profits, rather than developing new products and markets. Gone then was basic research that companies like IBM and AT&T were known for, and new research projects had to be tied to specific products.
As a retired IBM technologist and market strategist receiving a pension, I hate to be too critical, but it seems well deserved. IBM Watson (and its artificial intelligence base) is just the latest example. It makes me truly sad and also makes me fear for the future of our nation. That’s because I see the same mindset in other big corporations that have lost their way.
How Does The Brain Work? (video) — This NOVA episode features artificial intelligence and IBM Watson.
I lead a Linkedin discussion on ideas for creating a New Healthcare System and referred to this article. Here’s what I said…
Even the best doctors have trouble keeping up with the flood of new medical info, and asking them to map treatments to personal DNA or understand homeopathic and 1000-year-old Chinese treatments makes the task so much harder. But a tech solution might help. See https://www.mhealthtalk.com/2012/01/ask-dr-watson/.
Imagine a patient describing her symptoms to a physician or nurse with immediate access to a powerful supercomputer through their smartphone or tablet. IBM’s Watson, in just 3 seconds, is able to parse and analyze the equivalent of 300 million books to find relevant information and aid in the diagnostics and treatment plan. (AT&T is also working on deep data mining and medical analytics. https://www.mhealthtalk.com/2012/02/ihie/)
Next, imagine when individual health consumers gain access to similar cloud-based services that also monitor environmental & bio sensors and analyze trends. And then imagine the benefit when medical researchers can analyze sanitized medical records from millions of people to better determine what works for whom and when.
How fast will this happen? Consider the labor & healthcare implications of extending Moore’s Law out 50 years. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that By 2013, a supercomputer will have the reasoning and processing capacity of the Human Brain. By 2023, a $1,000 home computer will have that power, and by 2037, a $0.01 embedded computer will. AND… By 2049, a $1,000 computer will have the power of the human RACE, and by 2059, a $0.01 computer will. That could all happen in our lifetimes. Is this something the King of the World will pay for?
For more forecasts on the future of healthcare, see https://www.mhealthtalk.com/2011/10/forecasts/.
Here’s a press release announcing IBM’s Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare. Read about new IBM software that helps analyze the world’s data for healthcare transformation.
See also: Moore’s Law and the FUTURE of Healthcare