Re:IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
by peter303 on Sunday August 07, 2016 @10:24AM
(#12242155)
Each generation of computer power enables new AI techniques. Expert systems require explicit distillation of "rules". That took a lot of human work. And they are considered brittle when they are outside their expertise. But expert systems could on the million times weaker computers of the 1980s.
Watson employes statistical searching of large knowledge bases. You dont have to explicity ferret out all the rules and relationships. Google Translate does this too. There is no preprogrammed language dictionary.
The next frontier is deep learning which requires powerful computing to operate in real time.
All these techniques have their limitations. No magic bullet yet.
"The technology" has "certainly been there" since at least 1970, with software like MYCIN:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin
MYCIN was an early expert system that used artificial intelligence to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics
It and its ilk (expert systems, with hand-crafted rules) (it was the '70s) where commonly shown to outperform experts:
MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria.
Yet, we still don't have (flying cars) AI that can help doctors make better diagnoses- and note I'm by no means advocating replacing the experts with AI. That would open a whole other can of worms (what do you train your AI on when there's no more experts, because you replaced them all with AI?).
But- just having the tech doesn't auto-solve your problems as if by magic. You gotta beat dumb politics first.