Is IBM Watson A 'Joke'?

On the May 8th edition of Closing Bell on CNBC, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital, created quite a stir in enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) circles, when he took on Watson, Big Blue's AI platform. "Human intelligence outperforms machine-learning applications in complex decision making routinely required during the course of care, because machines do not yet possess mature capabilities for perceiving, reasoning, or explaining," explained Ernest Sohn, a chief data scientist in Booz Allen's Data Solutions and Machine Intelligence group; Joachim Roski, a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton; Steven Escaravage, vice president in Booz Allen's Strategic Innovation Group; and Kevin Maloy, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine. "A health care organization that relies on a single EHR [Electronic Health Record] vendor's analytic solutions, as well as its own legacy analytics infrastructure created before the era of big data, may see limited progress," they continued. "While many machine-learning solutions are not yet mature and sophisticated enough to support complex clinical decisions, machine learning can be effectively deployed today to reduce more routine, time-consuming, and resource-intensive tasks, allowing freed-up personnel to be redeployed to support higher-end work."