IBM’s Artificial Intelligence Problem, or Why Watson Can’t Get a Job by Drake Bennett.
From the post:
What if we built a super-smart artificial brain and no one cared? IBM (IBM) is facing that possibility. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is having a hard time making money off of its Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, Watson. The company has always claimed that Watson was more than a publicity stunt, that it had revolutionary real-world applications in health care, investing, and other realms. IBM Chief Executive Officer Virginia Rometty has promised that Watson will generate $10 billion in annual revenue within 10 years, but according to the Journal, as of last October Watson was far behind projections, only bringing in $100 million.
The Journal article focuses on difficulties and costs in “training” Watson to master the particulars of various businesses—at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, at Citigroup (C), at the health insurer WellPoint (WLP). But there may also be another issue: the sort of intelligence Watson possesses might not be a particularly good fit for some of the jobs IBM is looking at.
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A very good summary of the issues around getting Watson some paying work.
My take away was that you can replace people in a complex situation, like medical diagnosis, but if and only if, you are willing to accept degraded results.
How degraded remains to be seen. I can say I would not want to be the medical malpractice carrier for Watson.
Which makes me wonder about the general trend of replacing people with machines. There are many tasks that machines can perform, but if and only if you are willing to accept degraded results.
For example, I am sure you have seen the machine learning sites that promise you too can analyze data like a pro! No training, expensive data scientists, etc. Just plug your data in and go.
I don’t doubt that you can “plug you data in and go” but I also have little doubt about the quality of results that you obtain.
After all, we (people in general) are the creators of computers, the data you want to process, the algorithms you will use, why it is important to exclude people from your process?
Cheaper? If results are all that count, casino dice are about $12.00 for five (5), even cheaper than online machine learning services. Just roll the dice and fill in the numbers you need.