People don't seem to realize how huge this is. This venture could easily turn out to be the most profitable in IBM's history, and one of the most important inventions in health care.
"50 years of successful predictive modeling should be enough: Lessons for philosophy of science (2002)"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.217....
Idiocracy, the movie
From "Thinking, Fast and Slow":
"The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment. No exception has been convincingly documented."
Also interesting:
"Several studies have shown that human decision makers are inferior to a prediction formula even when they are given the score suggested by the formula! They feel that they can overrule the formula because they have additional information about the case, but they are wrong more often than not."
By distributing responsibility over many doctors (who hail from many medical schools), you make the pain more manageable. The concentrated responsibility that would result from having a single decision system make many many care decisions might be very difficult to stomach.
The thing is: I expect Watson to perform significantly better than this. If it can beat Jeopardy grandmasters consistantly and if that technology is correctly being reapplied to the medical field, Watson should easily outperform anything we had before.
Imagine this scenario. John earns 100K $/year, so he gets access to Watson. Jerry earns only 30K $/year, so he can only use the open source one, which has 10% less accuracy. That would be tragic.
Another scenario: doctor X sees the Watson prediction, and has a doubt about them. He doesn't say anything for fear he could be charged with malpractice if the patient dies under his different treatment. Thus, doctor X is reduced to a yes man, and his boss is not even another man, but an artificial brain. How many doctors would dare oppose Watson ? Do we need doctors any more if all they do is rubber stamp Watson's results? What about medical students - if they know that the difference in diagnosis accuracy between a medium and a top student has been reduced to just 2-3%, why strive to learn more than the other? After all, it's the same whether you are in the top 1% or around the middle of your class.
Ok, now for a positive scenario: we get cell phones with biometric sensors (medical tricorder) and we can input our symptoms. We are trained to do that because we took a 3 month medical class while in high-school. It was compulsory. So, now we can treat 80-90% of our problems without going into a doctor's office. This is amazing especially for remote areas and places where there is no access to doctors for hundreds of miles.
Africa would be revolutionized by it. A single medical nurse with a cell phone / mobile lab could service many people.
Why is a Pareto improvement (everyone being better off than before) tragic?
Problem: some will suffer emotionally and psychologically by being underemployed or unemployed.
Solution: There isn't one. Welcome to reality.
At one extreme, we have a negative utopia run by a techno-elite that designs, builds and installs an army of robots to relieve everyone of dull, repetitive, boring jobs, and thereby produces an unequal distribution of wealth even more extreme than what is true at present.
At the other, we have another negative utopia in which no on goes wanting, resources are distributed according to Marxist ideals (from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs). I think the second has already been tried, and failed, and I don't think the automation of labor will change the outcome.
Between the negative utopias, we have some version of reality, without the ability or the will to force any extreme solution onto the public. We'll just muddle along and adjust to the future, to the degree that we can foresee, and deal with, its effects.
Similarly, if a bunch of racists feel anger because black people can now eat at the same diner as them, I think the word "tragic" would be the wrong word.
"Social justice" is a typically poorly defined, loftily written way of replacing "I'm jealous" with "it's not faaaiir".
From what I've heard, med school is mostly about memorizing huge amounts of information without a whole lot of critical thinking. But that's a task that computers are infinitely better at than humans. Wouldn't it be a good thing if Watson could free med students from rote memorization, allowing them to instead focus on something that humans are actually good at, like research?
Correction: Healthcare in Africa "could" be revolutionized by it. No amount of tech/aid is going to "fix" Africa until decades of human greed and stupidity get reversed.
10% less accuracy isn't tragic if it is phenomenonally better than what we have today.