Is this Jeopardy Champion Smarter than a Human Doctor?

Watson sets its sights on saving lives

I read a very interesting article in the November issue of Fast Company magazine.

Watson, IBM's wunderkind supercomputer, achieved a milestone when it won a game of Jeopardy in 2011 against human opponents. But the folks at Big Blue weren't going to rest on their laurels. They had bigger mountains to climb.

Watson never goes on vacation. And it never forgets a fact. On the contrary, it keeps learning.

Watson can review, assimilate, and store more data in a day than any human can do in a lifetime. One example given in the article is that Watson can ingest all of the world's medical journals in the time it takes a physician to drink a cup of coffee.

Obviously, for the foreseeable future, human physicians will be a key part of the diagnostic and treatment process. But when it comes to the grunt work that can break open a perplexing case, you simply cannot beat a computer, even if you are the enigmatic doctor in the TV show House. Armed with every medical article, info on every drug, every treatment option, and the ability to cross-reference all this information in minutes, is intriguing. Watson will not give us a single answer in most cases. It will give us a range of options, and levels of confidence for each option, but the final decision will rest with a living, breathing physician.

Doctors at Sloan-Kettering are prepping a Watson computer for real patients. A diagnosis that could have taken weeks, and resulted in merely a best-guess by a physician or a medical team, may only take minutes by Watson. That may mean the difference between life and death for many patients.

Insurers are tapping into Watson, too. Wellpoint is using a Watson to aid in approving medical procedures.

Watcon represents what IBM calls the third computer age: Cognitive Computing. True artificial intelligence. Machines will learn to speak in our language. It's a huge leap over tabulating machines, and programmable systems, which represented the first two ages of computing.

Imagine what this technology will be like when we will have it on our smart phones. "Watson, can you take a look at this growth on my arm?"