This may be a bit of a departure from our usual fare here at PC Mech, but some things are just too awesome to leave unreported.
Everybody remembers IBM’s legendary computer “Watson”, right? You know the PC that defeated both the legendary Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy? The system with rudimentary AI that allows it to answer questions posed to it? It’s just taken a giant leap forward, with IBM planning to put it to work diagnosing and treating cancer.
The hardware manufacturer recently announced that it plans to add the latest oncology research and all of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s experience to Watson’s already formidable database, with plans to continue updating it for the foreseeable future. The result, IBM and the center’s researchers hope, will be the capability to nail down cases of cancer and treat them with an efficiency that would be impossible with an all-human staff. By the end of next year, Watson should be ready to start its residency at the hospital.
If IBM succeeds in their test with Watson at Sloan-Kettering, it could lead to a breakthrough in medicine that might well become available all around the world.
IBM is basically developing the first medical AI, says Dr. Larry Norton. “You boil together knowledge and sophistication and experience and what you have is wisdom.
More and more, it’s starting to feel like we’re living in a science fiction novel. Each day that goes by, our computers become more intelligent, more powerful, more capable. experience and what you have is wisdom,” he said. “No one’s ever captured wisdom in a way that can facilitate medical decision making.” What’s more, Watson can apparently even take patient preferences into consideration when prescribing treatments. To say this is revolutionary is an understatement, and there’s a great many places they could go from here- consider for a moment what other illnesses Watson might be put to use treating.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Artificial intelligence has always been a passion of mine- I just thought I might share that passion with all of you, for a moment.
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I’m sure it will be a long time before Watson actually uses divine wisdom to treat any patient with the most reliable, cheap and least invasive methods first. The powers that be do not want patients to be treated with honest medicine. There’s no money in it for them.