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IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

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Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#371

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I'm okay with this: humans likely make hilariously bad guesses about things that are obvious and easily accessible to machines, and therefore the reverse is also true. Guessing "what are trousers" for king of Egypt isn't in itself an indicator the whole Watson system is flawed. Although you're right: it's an indicator the intelligence is non human-like. Just like, from Watson's perspective, a human named John making…

Humans understand the value of saying "I don't know" then their internally measured probability of accuracy is very low. AIs don't seem to have that "gate," and to a human, it does make them appear to be very 'foolish' machines.

That's really a choice. I mean most machine learning models wind up outputting a confidence distribution over possible outputs, so it's up to the user to decide how to extract an answer from that. They can and do have low confidence when they aren't sure.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#372
post #14

I really expected that we'd see a change in my lifetime, that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant, with there being some other role for patient interaction, wet work, and data entry (perhaps just nurses). My mom worked for a GP for about 20 years, and it seemed to me that most of what made that guy a doctor was bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things. But GPs often ma…

> most of what made that guy a doctor was bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things.

Sure, that, and recognizing patterns and adjusting medication and being able to use good judgement for when to escalate to a referral for a specialist. But that's a lot!

I actually go to a teaching hospital for my primary care. It means I get seen by residents, and almost always also by very experienced teaching doctors. It ends up meaning that I get more time and attention by people who are actively learning and trying hard to do the right thing. The trade-off is there's no long-term trust relationship, but I am OK with that. I've also experienced care from elderly family doctors who run a "one-man-band" with a nurse and a receptionist, they're nice but I think I get better care at a teaching hospital.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#373

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…

IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something. This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology. I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world…

To be fair, paying them for the privilege to sell them something makes more sense than the inverse.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#374
post #280

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A two tiered system might actually be better for improving access to affordable health. Mid-level providers seem to achieve equivalent outcomes for routine cases at lower cost. I agree that Congress should increase funding for residency programs. https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/ama-seeks-mor...

I generally dismiss these “equivalent outcome” studies. Any midlevel will (and should) bounce the more complicated cases to their supervising physicians. Outcomes at that point are meaningless. There’s definitely a trade off between resources devoted to education vs. acceptable risks from failed procedures, missed/delayed diagnoses, and increased utilization of imaging and referrals (and the physician radiologists an…

> the problem is that nobody with better options (which includes midlevels) wants to live in these places.

Or the problem is that people are not offered enough money to make the sacrifices they would make by living in rural places.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#375
post #24

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> bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things My impression is that accompanying a patient is super important, it helps to understand illness, to have a plan in case of more complex treatments, etc. Then my doctor has the ability to know me and gauge my health. She's also very good at probabilities and detecting when something really goes wrong. I'm sure that being able to do that require a lot more than…

Knowing the ontology of your patients and their risk is also a tenet of a doctor's job, but we can do it with AI too. Hell, ontological engineering had a revamp specifically so that we could have a standardized model to describe any and all "parts" of a "whole" in a way that machines could understand.

No we really can't do that with AI yet. Current AI technology is nowhere near that level.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#376
post #81

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Self driving cars are just that, marketing. Tesla for all their hype have limited driver assist only and even Google who seem to have the most advanced offering only works in limited areas in good conditions and the dataset that drives it requires lots of maintenance. The general problem is too hard, and general practice has some of the same problems. Probably less adversarial data, but there’s still litigation to be…

Limited driver assist? Are all the videos of people using Tesla full self-driving on YouTube fake?

What videos would those be, like this one?

https://youtu.be/uClWlVCwHsI

Tesla’s safety claims are wildly overstated, as documented here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855608

In aggregate, Tesla’s FSD is demonstrably not up to the task. “Limited driver assist” is a much more fair assessment of what their software is actually capable of than the “full self driving” branding.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#377
post #30

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> But GPs often make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running. The private ones might the ones in the public system at least in my country need to see a patient every 10 minutes to keep their heads above water.

What country are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?

I'm from Spain and my wife is a family doctor. It really is like that here too.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#378
post #39

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Currently they have one of the only if not the only enterprise permissioned blockchain project called fabric and it’s open source. I could see them making a comeback with crypto but not the way we think about it today. Instead, inter-enterprise operations infrastructure.

What is the use case for this technology? If it's permissioned, it might as well be a normal database with the "append-only" setting enabled.

HyperLedger Fabric docs have an example of a manufacturer, vendor and short term finance provider all on the same network with transactions happening instantaneously. Then when you look into case studies, Honeywell has an airplane parts marketplace that’s apparently streamlined their sales process. I’ve seen some Upwork contractors demoing medical data platforms. I didn’t understand that one as much.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#380
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things My impression is that accompanying a patient is super important, it helps to understand illness, to have a plan in case of more complex treatments, etc. Then my doctor has the ability to know me and gauge my health. She's also very good at probabilities and detecting when something really goes wrong. I'm sure that being able to do that require a lot more than…

What data is being collected on you? Once a year blood test if that even? I actually suspect it would be trivial to beat my doctor after 5 years of higher frequency full blood panel data collection. 10 full blood panel samples a year, have 20 million people do that for a data set we can do classification on. I think my doctor is kind of out of business then. Will never happen in my life though with health insurance a…

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