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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

I would think Watson can replace most lawyers (and MDs, and ...) of this world. Most of them don't think and just rehash stuff they learnt, just like Watson does. Sure for the exceptions you need actual people, but that is the same time when you would go from your corner lawyer to a more prominent one and when your doctor would forward you to an expert anyway.

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Seriously?

Watson could replace lawyers or doctors for people that equate Google searches to legal advice or medical advice. Think legalzoom and webmd... Absolutely seems like it could be an entertaining way for a non lawyer or no doctor to explore a law or medical library. The majority on my time spent with lawyers has been discussing my issue until it could be distiled down to a couple concise legal questions; I bought a short sell house and the seller demanded that I put a clause in the contract that said his bank couldn't issue him an i9... I have. No authority over tax laws but I also didn't want any liability or an invalid contract, nor to willingly build a bogus one. There was some real language subtlty to it all and I didn't even know the questions to ask.

Same with doctors, pain is relative, strong pains turn lesser pains into mild discomfort and people are insanely good at ignoring and normalizing pains away. Do most patients even know what to ask or describe?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a lawyer and a doctor on my smartphone all day everyday but it still seems like a ways off. Watson really seems like a tool that cuts your legal fees because your lawyers research time drops 90% or something. (Or rather, he makes 90% more profit from you..)

Watson is already better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-me...

Human doctors need sleep. They get tired. They get old. You'll still need innovation in the medical field, but lets not kid ourselves that we need a gourmet chef in every McDonalds.

Conversation you will never hear in a Dr. office:

  me: i have pain in my side
  dr: 25%: something you ate 22%: appendicitis, 18%: kidney stone...

Conversation you will never hear in a lawyer's office:

  me: am i allowed to...
  lawyer: 42%: Maybe, 38%: Yes, 20%: No

This is only true when there isn't enough information supplied. You can't expect the doctor to figure out what the problem is just by telling the doctor you have a pain in your side, same goes for the lawyer's scenario.

Exactly. It's not that the doctors know anything more here, they just don't (can't) quantify their confidence (and later reliably update on new evidence).

No offense to doctors/lawyers meant here; all human brains suck at that.

Did you consider that that's not the point I'm making?

The confidences here provide misinformation. This is more harmful than no information.

They are only misinformation if it is misunderstood what they represent.

How is it misinformation? The human doctor would not tell us his diagnosis in terms of percentages, because we as humans have a hard time grasping probabilities intuitively. That doesn't mean that a probabilistic diagnosis would not be more accurate.

The doctors job is to provide me with as much information about the objective criteria of my physical condition as possible. However when it comes to making choices about my treatment, say in the case of accepting/rejecting an experimental drug with some potentially nasty side effects, it should be entirely my own value judgement on what to do with said information.

I've learned a bit about a Watson from internal IBM information and this is something they understand and are working on. There are serious ethical concerns about what to tell someone, even if the diagnosis is quite compelling, IOW, "you have 6 months to live" needs to come from a human. Obviously, the approach is to have it work as a tool for a doctor, not as a WebMD type self-diagnosis service. There are all kinds of follow-up questions, which you'd need to be a doctor to even answer, because they'd be couched in medical lingo e.g. systolic/diastolic blood pressure.

The medical example is called a differential diagnosis. Medical school teaches you to make this. Communicating only the highest-ranked one or two items, unless explaining why you're ordering tests that rule out lower-ranked but actionable diagnoses, is not difficult.

Disclaimer: IANAD.

Watson can't replace most physicians. Physicians have to physically interact with a patient to gather a relevant medical history as well as subjective and objective observations about the patient's symptoms. Robots and machine vision systems are nowhere near being able to fill that role.

Watson might be able to partially replace some specialists that primary care physicians use for consultations. When PCPs are unsure about a diagnosis or proper plan of care they will often consult with a specialist for advice via phone or e-mail. So in that case the PCP has already gathered at least some preliminary data and could feed it to a computer. But even for that use case Watson won't be able to provide same level of back-and-forth interaction that's often necessary to achieve the correct result.

The volume of medical data being created and published is rapidly increasing, and it would take a doctor to read something like 160 hours per week to stay on top of their field. There are only 168 hours in a week, so there is really no way a doctor today can keep up with what is going on . The idea of Watson is to be able to take large amounts of unstructured data (i.e. an entire patient history and current symptoms) and be able to find a solution. I don't think Watson will replace a doctor or physical interaction anytime soon, but a device connected to Watson or similar solution will most definitely be used to augment the doctor's diagnosis and treatment solution.

The point is, that (hopefully) your doctor knows where his expertise ends and when to refer you to an expert. I'm not sure Watson could reliably do the same.

Fed with enough medical knowledge, Watson would be the expert.

Well, MDs just send you away when stuff doesn't go away or they think it's serious; I think Watson can easily be instructed to do the same. If it belongs in the category 'probably needs expert' he should pass his conclusions about what it is and so on to a human expert. Similarly with the cough he subscribed medicine for and after 1 week it's not gone yet; expert. This is what human MDs do as well and I had MDs actually tell me to 'be a man, suck it up' so not sure if Watson could do worse.

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