Singularity thoughts part 3 – I’m being replaced by a computer

Not really, but it seemed like a catchy title.  As an update, I still don’t have power (curse you hurricane Sandy!) but kind friends do.  They also have a warm basement.  Friends are awesome. 🙂

Anyways, the post.  I read during my intermittent internet usage this week an interesting article about IBMs Watson learning medicine.

I.B.M.’s Watson Goes to Medical School – NYTimes.com.

From the article, quoting Dr. Ferucci, the man behind Watson:

In medicine, he said, you have a problem with many variables. For example, a 69-year-old female with certain symptoms, vital signs, family history, medications taken, genetic makeup, diet and exercise regimens.

Someday, Dr. Ferrucci said, Watson should be able to collect and assess all that patient data, and then construct “inference paths” toward a probable diagnosis – digesting information, missing nothing and winnowing choices for a human doctor.

I have to admit, that sounds pretty good.  I’m in medical school now, and there are a bajillion facts and figures to learn and try to memorize.  In our day and age of multimedia devices, internet, Google and Siri, I’m never a few clicks away from the answer to most any question, making it kind of annoying to have to memorize random facts and details.

An important question, especially along the title theme of singularity, is what does the human bring to the equation?  If computers are so awesome that they can learn, analyze and utilize data better then us, what are we good for at all?  What do we add when you have a super-smart computer?

I honestly don’t have a right answer.  Maybe we are just selfish meat bags who want to be in control, and we want to know that other human’s are in control of things, like our health, and not some computer or robot.  It is hard (if not impossible) to program real empathy and sympathy.

That’s one of the things that I love the most about our story, is that we talk about how an AI becomes more human, about what the perfect blending of man and computer may be.

Don’t forget, we’re launching our comic this Monday, so come and read.  Also, answer this question for me in the comments below:  Would you be comfortable with Watson as your doctor?  Why or why not?