In a report that surfaced from Stat News it appears that several IBM internal documents show that medical experts that worked with the Watson supercomputer found “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations”.
Back in 2012, the Memorial Loan Kettering Cancer Center partnered with IBM in order to train Watson to diagnose and treat patients. If it would have been left to its own devices, the supercomputer would have caused nothing but disaster. At one point, Watson recommended both chemotherapy as well as medicine that would have caused fatal hemorrhage.
The documents reveal the medical staff’s strong criticism towards Watson. Most of the problems are rooted in the fact that Watson has been fed hypothetical data, not real patient data.
Hence, its suggestions were based on the treatments preferred by the doctors providing the data and not on the impartial knowledge Watson could have gained from real cases.
The company insisted Watson is still learning, but it’s definitely going to be a long time before the supercomputer will be allowed to make decisions on its own, if at all.
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