Sounds like they prepared limited and bad training data for it. As usual, garbage in, garbage out.
IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#22We're putting a lot of faith in tools that can best be described as immature. I don't think it's out of the question to get A.I. (not speaking of Watson, which is A.I. adjacent) to the point where it can perform perfectly at human intelligence tasks. The point is to have these systems perform better than their human counterparts (at least, I think that should be aim for something like Watson for Health). The people w…
"We're putting a lot of faith in..."
OK. Back in the real world, successful AI companies build useful software products that inform human decision making but do not directly, unilaterally, unintermediatedly result in real-world kinetic action.
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#23That's okay, though, right? We're not talking about fully automating diagnosis and treatment. We're talking about using a tool to help doctors diagnose and treat more effectively. i.e. it's more like predictive text input than anything. If it makes it faster for you to diagnose, makes harder to diagnose stuff easier, and recommends the right treatment most of the time then it saves the doctor some time and energy. Th…
If you genuinely don't know how to spell something (children, ESL) then auto-correct might cause you to accept a correction to the wrong homophone and fool you into thinking it helped you.
If the doctor doesn't know how to quickly and cheaply verify the machine's guess, they'll just rubber stamp its recommendations.
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#24That's okay, though, right? We're not talking about fully automating diagnosis and treatment. We're talking about using a tool to help doctors diagnose and treat more effectively. i.e. it's more like predictive text input than anything. If it makes it faster for you to diagnose, makes harder to diagnose stuff easier, and recommends the right treatment most of the time then it saves the doctor some time and energy. Th…
It depends on how doctors view IBM's magic black box. If they grow to trust and depend on it, that could become a real problem.
People have a tendency to defer, and have a bias towards deferring to machines that seemingly behave as accurately as a calculator would with basic arithmetic.
A true crisis can arise if doctors can shift liability by claiming to have just followed Watson's results.
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#25That's okay, though, right? We're not talking about fully automating diagnosis and treatment. We're talking about using a tool to help doctors diagnose and treat more effectively. i.e. it's more like predictive text input than anything. If it makes it faster for you to diagnose, makes harder to diagnose stuff easier, and recommends the right treatment most of the time then it saves the doctor some time and energy. Th…
No it's not okay!
It increases the probability of (harmful) medical error. The "unsafe" is a big, big gotcha for regulatory approval. As someone correctly pointed out, this is relative to human error rates (can't view article because of registration).
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#26That's okay, though, right? We're not talking about fully automating diagnosis and treatment. We're talking about using a tool to help doctors diagnose and treat more effectively. i.e. it's more like predictive text input than anything. If it makes it faster for you to diagnose, makes harder to diagnose stuff easier, and recommends the right treatment most of the time then it saves the doctor some time and energy. Th…
We're talking about using a tool to help doctors diagnose and treat more effectively.
A very expensive tool when healthcare systems are strapped for cash. Super unethical of IBM to try and extract profits here.
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#27We're putting a lot of faith in tools that can best be described as immature. I don't think it's out of the question to get A.I. (not speaking of Watson, which is A.I. adjacent) to the point where it can perform perfectly at human intelligence tasks. The point is to have these systems perform better than their human counterparts (at least, I think that should be aim for something like Watson for Health). The people w…
Totally agree. Applying existing ML/"AI" to treating cancer is extremely misguided, and IMO dangerous and unethical. ML performs very well for specific well defined tasks that have an obvious outcome and are highly narrow in scope. Cancer is a disease that we can't even treat ourselves in many cases. It requires a great deal of creativity and critical thinking to reach solutions on a case by case basis. Who is so arr…
There has long been a calculus of using more risky or long shot treatments for the more deadly or hopeless diseases. Certain types of cancer are essentially death sentences.
Maybe it's counterintuitive, but it makes a lot more sense to use ML for cancer than say a broken arm. There are so many systems interacting in cancer that affect its progression that humans really are at there limits in trying to understand them.
And as others have said, no one is letting Baymax loose in the oncology ward and firing all the doctors. This is just one more tool in a doc's tool belt -- and far from the only that will give misleading results.
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#28That's okay, though, right? We're not talking about fully automating diagnosis and treatment. We're talking about using a tool to help doctors diagnose and treat more effectively. i.e. it's more like predictive text input than anything. If it makes it faster for you to diagnose, makes harder to diagnose stuff easier, and recommends the right treatment most of the time then it saves the doctor some time and energy. Th…
The other question is how does it compare to human doctors, they also sometimes recommend unsafe or wrong treatment.
The some other other questions: how much does it cost, compared to training a human? Does it actually save any time / resources if it's outputs must always be scrutinized?
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#29Honest question: how much top-tier ML research comes out of IBM Research? I feel like they get what they paid for---and they pay shit from what I hear.
Should have partnered with Google if you actually wanted something that works. IBM had its heyday, but the brain drain of talent and knowledge has already happened and it likely will never recover.
Is that also true of their quantum computing researchers? It does look like they put out some pretty decent research in that area.
Re: IBM's Watson recommended 'unsafe and incorrect' cancer treatments
#30Honest question: how much top-tier ML research comes out of IBM Research? I feel like they get what they paid for---and they pay shit from what I hear.
I worked at TJ Watson research center at the end of the 20th century but not in a research role or on ML.
It’s weird because IBM spends a lot on research (6 billion when I was there) but they are always trying to get marketable things out of said research. They still had chip fabs when I was there so they had people working on chemistry physics and math for chip things. They had chess playing machines (deep blue) and a backgammon one using ai.
They hired a lot of phds who were for the most part very self motivated. Very smart people. I’m not sure if they are still getting the best and brightest but for a lot the IBM letters are a draw.