Dr. Watson Unsafe and Incorrect?
Five years ago I wrote about Dr. Watson and how it won’t replace doctors. I actually wrote about it before that in the former Placebo Journal blog. I thought it was interesting that this just came out:
Internal IBM documents show that its Watson supercomputer often spit out erroneous cancer treatment advice and that company medical specialists and customers identified “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations” as IBM was promoting the product to hospitals and physicians around the world.
Oops. I don’t want to say I told you so but…..
Truth be told I do think that Watson will get better at this type of stuff. Where it will ALWAYS fail is in picking up the nuances of medicine. You can’t just plug in weight gain, fatigue, and hair loss and expect hypothyroidism to be the answer.
I now expect Gomerblog or The Onion to talk about Dr. Watson being put on a PIP (performance improvement plan) and be subject to a State Board of Medicine review whereupon he contemplates quitting medicine as he sits in a car doing a J. That is what I would do. The parody part, I mean.
Oh, and let’s call this whole Dr. Watson thing what it is, shall we? It’s just another way for administrators to replace us. As a physician I would embrace IBM and Watson that at your own peril.
Watson will never be able to palpate a patient’s anxiety and factor that in.
People laboring under superstitious beliefs usually believe they are smart and insightful. In most areas, they are. We have an unfounded superstition that “artificial intelligence,” which is intellectual reductionism into algorithm, can surpass human thought. I am alarmed by the contempt this shows in human thought and humanity in particular.
Artificial intelligence, when it works, operates by processing a sequence of explicit rules. This represents only a tiny fraction of human thinking, even when applied to concrete observations like diagnosis. Tacit thinking, or “gestalt” thinking, is an essential part of the methods used by physicians. The final end-point result of machine thinking is bureaucratic thinking, not individual human cognition. If we are to be forcibly assimilated into the “BORG,” we should not volunteer.
And PW is right. The ultimate goal of Dr. Watson and all the IT beliefs is to dump the liability for mistakes on the patient. Too bad for you! say the bureaucrats.
Can’t sue Doc Watson????