Although I haven’t worked directly on the IBM Watson project, most of my co-workers on the IBM creative team have. Watson has taken the better part of four years to develop and Ogilvy has been crafting sophisticated advertising to promote the project for the last two years. However as I watched Watson make its much anticipated primetime debut this week on Jeopardy, I was left more confused than inspired. I mean Jeopardy? Really? This is the most convincing platform to demonstrate the kickass capabilities of the world’s most advanced supercomputer? I don’t remember Einstein being forced to wipe the floor with the most accomplished Scrabble, Yahtzee or KerPlunk players before people bought into the whole E=MC2 thing. Perhaps there’s a contingent of folks who won’t be impressed until Watson wins the next season of American Idol. When I imagine Watson dragged across the game show circuit desperately trying to cement its credibility, I wonder if it’s just a matter of time before he’s reduced to some depressed burnout on Celebrity Rehab with Dr Drew.
In spite of peoples’ first encounter with Watson, it’s far more than a full time game show contestant. As I write this blog, the medical departments of both the University of Maryland and Columbia University together with a bunch of other brainy folks at IBM, are figuring out the best ways for Watson to work hand-in-hand with physicians and medical specialists. The expectation is that within a year, Watson will take a patient's electronic medical records, digest them, summarize them for the doctor and point out any causes for concern. But organizing and summarizing patient histories isn't all Watson is expected to do. The National Cancer Institute is anticipating that Watson will also be able to take patient and treatment information from hundreds, if not thousands of hospitals and pull it all together. Then when a doctor is considering treating a patient with a particular drug, they can first ask Watson how that treatment worked on patients with similar diagnoses and backgrounds. This radically improves doctors' care of their patients. But it doesn’t end there. Once Watson has the whole speech-recognition thing down, he can join doctors in an exam room, listen to patients talk about their symptoms while it runs through their medical records and suggests what ails them.
Watching Watson tackle complex medical problems, provide patient diagnoses or recommend drug treatments is infinitely more interesting and meaningful to me than seeing him embarrass former Jeopardy kingpins. More importantly, it opens peoples’ eyes to truly valuable applications of the world’s smartest supercomputer. Would it galvanize as many people? Would it lead to a ratings bonanza? I’m not sure, but it certainly wouldn’t leave us with a trivial first impression of potentially life saving technology.
Click here to learn more about IBM Watson.
