It was an audacious undertaking, even for one of the most storied American companies: With a single machine, IBM would tackle humanity's most vexing diseases and revolutionize medicine.
Breathlessly promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world's imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer.
But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn't living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM's goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.
[...] Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company's claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, "even new approaches" to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn't create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.
Watson "has failed to end a streak of 21 consecutive quarters of declining revenue at IBM." Ouch.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @01:38AM
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formulæ of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated. This is a decidedly indirect, and a somewhat speculative, consequence of such an invention. It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject. There are in all extensions of human power, or additions to human knowledge, various collateral influences, besides the main and primary object attained.”
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday September 11 2017, @01:46AM (4 children)
As I approach 60, even though there is no cancer history in my family I'd hoped Watson would come up with something. Cuz there is alzheimer's in my family, and that scares the holy stinky stuff out of me.
Chillun, trust me on this. Getting old sucks. The only thing worse is not getting old.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @01:56AM
eh, 60's not a big deal, nothing happened when that decade flipped for me a few years ago. Aches and pains may be a little more common but if you ride a bike every now and then, or do some good walking to stay in shape, then you will probably be fine for many more years.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 11 2017, @04:29AM
I thought the Watson approach was about combing through a massive amount of new medical knowledge that individual doctors can't handle, and assisting in the creation of personalized diagnosis/treatment, including genome analysis. It's not suprising Watson has not borne fruit yet, but if it continues to suck for long it may bring down the company.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by bart9h on Monday September 11 2017, @09:10PM (1 child)
You can say "shit" on the Internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @01:28AM
Sure, let's promote crassness and weak vernacular by using naughty words like third-graders who just discovered them!
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday September 11 2017, @01:52AM
When "Dick n....s" troll would be an appropriate (and insightful) commentary vis-a-vis the "IBM sales reps", there's none to be found.
(slow head shacking in disappointment) way to stay relevant, DN troll, way to stay relevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Touché) by ledow on Monday September 11 2017, @02:05AM (6 children)
AI claims turn out to be bollocks and just bulk processing, statistics and heuristics.
Also grass is green and sky is blue.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Virindi on Monday September 11 2017, @02:24AM (4 children)
Of course it is junk. But the world runs on pure hype now, and this has a lot of hype behind it. It is surprising it is not more adopted.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Monday September 11 2017, @02:43AM (1 child)
Maybe if they marketed it as a "cloud app" with a cool Android interface it would sell better.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Monday September 11 2017, @02:51AM
If they aren't already giving doctors phones with an "app" interface, I'd be shocked! And of course it is sold as 'cloud', that is only natural...
Maybe that's the problem: they are still using a phone, when they should integrate it into a voice activated IoT device. With cameras. Naturally all data is sent back to IBM for "quality control" purposes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 11 2017, @02:56AM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday September 11 2017, @04:58AM
Getting the knowledge isn't as hard as they let on. It's getting the software right that's the challenge. If their software was better and more like a strong AI, they wouldn't need to ritualistically curate the knowledge.
The hardware AND software of 10 years from now will knock Siri, Alexa, and Watson out of the park. Maybe IBM bet on machine learning too early and won't see it to its conclusion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 11 2017, @04:30AM
It was understood to be like that. But it was thought that dumping a shit load of data into it would allow it to do things at least more impressive than answering trivia questions.
If that isn't the case, IBM could be doomed.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 11 2017, @02:48AM (2 children)
I noted at the time that Watson was vaporware. Since, Watson has followed a typical trajectory of vaporware with failed agreements [soylentnews.org] and presently revelations that it isn't even remotely as good as claimed. Who knew?
My point here is that we should learn from this example what empty technology claims sound like. Watson just might turn into a powerful product down the road, replacing tons of high priced jobs or whatnot. But it has some serious teething problems to it. And what happens when someone builds a competing product without those problems?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday September 11 2017, @03:11AM
IBM might just get lucky, but the general feeling is that they are company on the way to disappearing.
It will take a long time, as they have a lot of money to burn through, and there will be people who insist on buying IBM for some time, but eventually they will do what HP seems to be in the process of doing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Monday September 11 2017, @08:13AM
Notice that it doesn't say that anything actually happened. It just "seemed a lot less certain". That's pretty empty rhetoric.
It's like suggesting that traditional electric companies ran in fear of solar startups. It's a nice image, but it's not actually true.
The fact is that AI doesn't exist. We don't have the languages to express it, the hardware to run it, or the brains to make it. We have clever tricks, statistics and brute-force, but nothing approaching any kind of "self-thinking" / "self-learning" computer. It has to be told exactly what to do with the input data (which basically means it's just a bunch of heuristics, which somehow has become a buzz-word for AI but it basically just means "human-written rules" when applied to computers).
Sure, it can do some clever stuff, but it's because it's sufficiently advanced heuristics. Anybody who deals in this stuff knows that it's not actually miraculous, however. It's "clever". It puts on a good show. But its use is limited. Google's AlphaGo was much more of a surprise, but it's still just the same in the end. The application outside of theoretical logic problems is quite limited and difficult to apply.
We just don't know how to tell a computer how to make itself learn. We lack the expression of language, the language to express it in, and the interpretation that a computer can apply. If we leave everything to its own devices we end up with very, very, very limited neural networks and such-like that take years of training to do the very simplest of things and fall foul of every pitfall even so. They are unprogrammable, unteachable, and unpredictable.
The day a machine becomes self-learning and self-aware is literally an epoch-changing moment. We'll start the "AI Age". That's not going to happen only 100 or so years after the invention of the computer. It's just not ready yet. And we can't even define how we learn or operate, let alone instruct a machine in such a way that it's then no longer reliant on our every instruction.
===
Personally, I draw comparisons with AI to Turing-completeness. We're making machines that are solely Turing-complete. Everything we do is done in Turing-complete languages and hardware. But there's no evidence to suggest that any "real" intelligence is limited to only Turing-completeness. If we thinking-beings operate on some higher level, it may well be that you cannot simulate us even with the largest Turing-complete machine known to the universe. Even quantum computing is currently describable in Turing-complete terms. But what if you need something else to actually express the way we operate? What if all we can ever manage is Turing-complete tricks? Such that it "looks" intelligent but can never actually be so? Sure, we'll use it for self-driving cars or whatever, and have some utility but there will always be that upper bound that stops it progressing or doing so on its own.
If we lack the method to describe intelligence ourselves, especially so in a format that a computer can interpret, what makes us think we can make computer-based intelligence?
And can humans actually solve problems that Turing-complete machines cannot? The famous one that comes to mind is things like the Halting Problem. Could humans - given infinite time and resources - tell whether any given program was going to end? It seems to me that it just might be possible. If we can come up with multiple solutions that can solve it for any given program, that give definitive answers, and all come from a single intelligence, is that intelligence itself a general purpose machine that could defeat the Halting Problem (at least in theory)?
It seems to me that there's a missing element to intelligence that our machines lack but which we may possess, and which we ourselves lack the capability to express. That doesn't mean it's some creator-given unique characteristic, but that we're just not able to express it like we can't describe many other things. It may well be - especially with clock-speed and other physical limitations - that computer AI isn't even possible with the architectures we can use for it. There's nothing in the human brain that oscillates three billion times a second, or even close, but we seem to think that's necessary to simulate a human brain. Or even an insect brain.
Personally, I think we're barking up the wrong tree and need to find a entirely new way to look at things, rather than just throwing brute force and billions of nodes at the problem blindly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 11 2017, @04:55AM (1 child)
Anymore, everything IBM does seems crudely calculated to push sales of their hardware. Finesse and elegance reduce the need for computing, therefore IBM pushes brute force approaches to problem solving. What is the point of having speech recognition capability in Watson? Just an excuse to use more hardware.
In the 1980s, they nearly missed out on the personal computer revolution, belatedly throwing together their PC, 4 years after the Apple II. They really didn't want the PC to succeed as that would cut into their mainframe biz.
In the 1990s they blew it with OS/2, failing to aggressively market a product technically superior to Window 95.
And now? What does IBM aspire to now? To be the Dell Computer of high end PC server hardware? They sure haven't tried smartphones or game consoles. At least Microsoft tried. Bunch of wusses scared of Apple. Sad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @03:43PM
I had roommate back then that had 95/OS/2 warp dual booted, it was actually a much superior OS it even had a 95 emulation mode(which sucked but that's why you have dev's) the problem was it couldn't play games for shit, I'm pretty sure this is the sum total of the reason it failed, work OS's are nice but if people won't use them at home it will never go anywhere Linux is slowly correcting this problem but same deal, both dos and windows where always the gaming platform OS and it shows in MS's market dominance
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @08:23AM (9 children)
As a molecular biologist I never understood why people assumed that various types of cancer should be considered the same... or even treated the same. Sure there is some overlap in the ways cancers work and behave, but one should not put all of them on one heap to find a cure. It just doesn't make sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @09:25AM
Nanobots are the one cure for all cancer. IBM Watson is just shuffling up papers in RAM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @01:05PM (6 children)
I've had my share of graduate level microbiology, and must say it tends to confuse the issues regarding cancer.
It is actually quite simple: Cancer is when an organism's own cells grow out of control to the point they damage normal organ function. The vast majority (possibly all, if we allow for some error in the reporting) of such cells have chromosomal abnormalities (extra chromosomes, etc) that form during a faulty cell division.
Now, there is this meme going around that "cancer is many diseases", which was started because people questioned why cancer researchers were making such poor progress. Instead of pointing the blame on not funding or publishing direct replications, uninformative/incorrect methods sections, no training in basic tools for studying dynamic systems (calculus, programming), using NHST to draw conclusions, etc, they went right to the "biology is complicated" excuse. That may be so, but until the glaring behavioral/social issues surrounding cancer research are dealt with I don't think this is at all appropriate. For example, your microbiology training has left you unable to understand why the class of problems called cancer should be grouped together under one name. That is crazy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @03:06PM (5 children)
Sorry, but I don't fully agree with you.
Like I said, symptoms are often similar, but the underlying processes are not. You could throw all the cancers under one name and definition "Cancer" (like you state), but Watson got confused by it and got nowhere.
Take for example leukaemia, which is considered a group of cancer of white blood cells. Some of these cancers are very quick and lethal, while others are slow and can be properly treated (even if needed). The cells can even show different phenotypes, suggesting different processes are at work that cause the cells to become cancerous.
If "cancer is one disease" then that would also suggest one common/shared cause that could be treated with one medicine. If that would be the case the common cause would already be known (which is not, as quite a share of genes/loci have been pointed to as involved in various cancers) and the various different treatments (with different success rates) for various cancers show that you need to keep them separate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @05:54PM (4 children)
If you can detect aneuploidy in vivo and kill cells with the wrong number/shape of chromosomes you will be able to cure 90%+ of all cancer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:28PM (3 children)
If you could detect cells with foreign DNA/RNA, then you could cure 100% of bacterial and viral infections; therefore, all infectious disease is the same and we shouldn't bother calling them different diseases.
The distinctions among cancer types are useful for diagnosis, survival expectations, treatment development, and treatment strategy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @07:19PM (2 children)
Your idea is impossible in principle since no two cells will have exactly the same sequence. Not the same for number of chromosomes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @07:50PM (1 child)
That's funny because there is a lot of precedent for what I mentioned: basically all forms of microbial, plant and, obviously, mammalian immune defense systems. While your idea is a "simple answer to everything".
Since you are failing to connect the dots with that example, how about this:
If we had a mechanism to detect autoreactive immune cells and kill them, then we could cure all autoimmune disease; therefore, all autoimmune diseases are the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @08:47PM
I connected the dots just fine, the HLA system, etc doesn't do what you said. In the last case, sure. Different manifestations of the same disease, cured with a common treatment would now be one disease. That is what happens in the case of successful science, things get simpler to understand.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday September 11 2017, @04:30PM
You never understood why people assumed cancers should all be considered the same? People are stupid and they desperately want the most simple answer to be the whole truth. Don't quite your day job.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday September 11 2017, @11:38AM (1 child)
When fed all data about cancer, he keeps giving the same solution, snuff the meatbag. Why blame him?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:50AM
Tsk! Typical, who says Watson is a he? Sexist Bot!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @03:24PM
Watson fails to cure cancer. Bail on IBM! They didn't cure cancer after three years!!!!!
Geez . . .