Artificial intelligence is creeping into the insurance industry

A Tokyo-based personal insurance company announced it will replace 34 workers in its claims department with an artificial intelligence system based on IBM's infamous Watson. The system "will be tasked with reading medical certificates written by doctors and other documents to collect information necessary for making payouts, such as medical histories, length of hospital stays, and surgical procedure names," according to an English version of an article in the Japanese daily The Mainichi. "Artificial intelligence" is a slippery term that can mean everything from personal assistants like Siri, to the natural language processing done by Google, to systems modeled on the human brain that can teach themselves new skills by processing large amounts of data. In this case, the tasks that will be done by the Watson-esque system that is replacing workers at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co. don't sound much different from a typical computer program: scan for keywords, find values, check lookup tables, input all that information into an algorithm, spit out a recommendation. The final decision will be made by a human employee.