“I think a lot of folks in medicine, quite frankly, tend to be afraid of technology like this,” said Iltifat Husain, an assistant professor at the Wake Forest School of Medicine. Many physicians and academics in medicine have come to view Watson’s work with reservation, despite reassurances from IBM officials that they are trying not to replace humans but to help them do their jobs better. Scientists are already testing baker bots that can whip up pastries, machines that can teach math in the classroom and robot anesthesiologists. Similar research by MIT business professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee has shown that this trend may be accelerating and that we are at the dawn of a “second machine age.” A 2013 paper by economists at the University of Oxford calculated the probability of 702 occupations being automated or “roboticized” out of existence and found that a startling 47 percent of American jobs - from paralegals to taxi drivers - could disappear in coming years. While there’s much debate about the extent to which technology is destroying jobs, recent research has driven concern. Low is part of an influential new movement in scientific research driven by young philanthropists and tech titans who have faith that the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data that powered the information revolution can also be used to understand, upgrade and heal the human body.īut the Watson project and similar initiatives also have raised speculation - and alarm - that companies are seeking to replace the nation’s approximately 900,000 physicians with software that will have access to everyone’s sensitive personal health information. It is really something we have gone through and seen what kind of difference it can make,” said Low, who is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and runs one of Asia’s most successful investment firms. He believes everyone, rich or poor, should have the same access to that kind of expertise. ![]() Low said that he felt fortunate to be able to connect his grandfather’s doctors remotely with MD Anderson specialists to devise the best treatment plan. Jho Low, the 33-year-old billionaire who is bankrolling the $50 million MD Anderson project with Watson, said the effort grew out of his grandfather’s treatment for leukemia in Malaysia. Instead of having to find specialists in a different city, photocopy and send all the patient’s files to them, and spend countless hours researching the medical literature, a doctor could simply consult Watson, she said. If you want expert care you have to go to an expert center,” she said, “but there are never enough of those to go around.” “I see technology like this as a way to really break free from our current health-care system, which is very much limited by the community providers. Lynda Chin, a physician-scientist and associate vice chancellor for the University of Texas system who is overseeing the Watson project at MD Anderson Cancer Center, said these types of programs are key to “democratizing” medical treatment and eliminating the disparity that exists between those with access to the best doctors and those without. It is a revolutionary approach to medicine and health care that is likely to have significant social, economic and political consequences. The IBM program is one of several new aggressive health-care projects that aim to sift through the huge pools of data created by people’s records and daily routines and then identify patterns and connections to predict needs. It’s even published its own cookbook, with 231 pages of what the company calls “recipes for innovation.” (The reviews haven’t been flattering - one foodie declared one of Chef Watson’s creations “the worst burrito I’ve ever had.”)īut these feats were essentially gimmicks. It’s done stints as a call center operator and hotel concierge, and been spotted helping people pick songs. The new guy’s name was a mouthful, so many of his colleagues simply called him by his nickname: Watson.įour years after destroying human competitors on “Jeopardy!” to win a suspense-filled tournament watched by millions, the IBM computer brain is everywhere. “Even if you work all night, it would be impossible to be able to put this much information together like that.” “I was surprised,” said Vitale, a 31-year-old who received her MD in Italy. When the fellows were asked to summarize patients’ records for the senior faculty in the mornings, he always seemed to have the best answers. ![]() Rumor had it that he had finished med school in two years and had a photographic memory of thousands of journal articles and relevant clinical trials.
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