Where Does AI Currently Stand in Healthcare?

If there's one thing that the future of healthcare can't seem to escape, it's the promise and potential of artificial intelligence (AI). Though the field has been around for quite some time, it wouldn't be until IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a series of seven chess games in 1997 that people would really begin taking machine learning and AI seriously. After two decades, IBM would be pushing another AI machine into the public eye, this time dubbed Watson, and presented as a game-changer for healthcare. Unfortunately, the hype hasn't quite lived up to the reality, prompting Chamath Palihapitiya, an influential tech investor who founded the VC firm Social Capital, to call Watson is "a joke" in May 2017 via CNBC. The good news is that, according to David H. Freedman writing for Technology Review, "most of the criticism of Watson … doesn't seem rooted in any particular flaw in the technology. Instead, it's a reaction to IBM's overly optimistic claims of how far along Watson would be by now. In fact, it still seems likely that Watson Health will be a leader in applying AI to health care's woes."