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Watson may be able to recommend you get surgery, but he won't be able to perform the surgery himself. He's only moving in on one aspect of medicine. Matching symptoms to diagnoses is the thing that machines are most clearly suited for in the entire medical profession, because of the vast volume of possible measurements and diagnoses, and because humans' various cognitive biases don't work well with the probabilistic nature of the work. That's still a rather narrow range of work. Humans will remain superior at performing medical work for quite a while. And until true Strong AI, humans will also remain superior for quite a large amount of gathering information that Watson requires, especially psychological measurements, and for making decisions that involve quality-of-life and other ethical considerations beyond just probability of success.

tl;dr Watson can, and will, exceed doctor's capability for a certain, somewhat narrow, range of their function. Doctors will still be necessary for the other things that they do.



http://www.intuitivesurgical.com/products/ Amazing, 3D vision robots. Very graceful translation of hand movements into the robots arms. Very nice product. Currently only for laparoscopic intra-abdominal surgery. Not yet automated. They have DaVinci assisted cardiac surgery programs developing in some parts of the country.

Robot assisted airway manipulation http://www.anesthesia-analgesia.org/content/111/4/929.abstra...

This robot could intubate you. DaVinci could operate on you.


Watson may not be able to perform surgery, but with "telesurgery" becoming a reality, maybe we can offshore it and still save 80%.


I've always wondered about this. What happens when the network goes down in the middle of open-heart surgery?


"And until true Strong AI"

Watson seems like a significant step in that direction.




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