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Article: Consequences of the creation of IBM Watson

мая 18, 2017
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Nowadays, technology is developing at an incredible speed. Such a huge amount of breakthroughs and accomplishments in various fields of science obstruct people from understanding the real potential of each attainment. One of the scientific achievements which does not have a lot of attention among the people is the creation of IBM Watson.

This paper reviews the main philosophy and goals behind this project tries to persuade people and give reasons for the fact that the work which has been done will force our lives to change in the near future. So, in order to be ready for these drastic changes, one should understand how jobs will change, which one of them will become obsolete, and what kind of knowledge and skills will be required in the near future.

Because of time and size constraints, this review cannot take into consideration all technological capabilities of the supercomputer and, therefore, to analyze the effects of it on all major fields of study and jobs. As a consequence, it was decided to concentrate on the two most valuable and important areas of human life: healthcare and business.

IBM Watson

Prior to talking about the effects of the development of IBM Watson on the world economics and labor market, it is of the main importance to understand what IBM Watson actually is, how it differs from previous solutions, and what its capabilities are. IBM Watson is a new type of computer program, an attempt to create a machine that would understand sophisticated and ambiguous written human language. The original goal of the new supercomputer was “to have computers start to interact in natural human terms across a range of applications and processes, understanding the questions that humans ask and providing answers that humans can understand and justify” (Brodkin, 2010) in order to take a part in a well known American tv game “Jeopardy!”, which it successfully won. The result was achievable because Watson uses a “radically new type of computing, different from the programmable systems that preceded it.” (IBM Watson, 2014)

Conventional programs are based on logic and strict rules in order to derive mathematically precise answers, whereas the Watson’s approach uses fuzzy logic and cognitive computing in order to derive highly probable information from volumes of data that mathematically precise algorithms and logic fail to derive. A few examples of programs for which the Watson’s approach would be more beneficial than the conventional one are a diagnosing tool, retirement portfolio advisor, or a program which creates new recipes. (IBM Watson, 2014) So, what Watson really does is that it structures all information and tries to find its hidden patterns.

Watson in Healthcare System

Because of the Watson’s ability to think critically, make decisions based on priorities and evidence, it makes him the best clinical decision support systems in the world. (Chaudhry, 2012)

Recently, Watson “studied” medicine and, as a consequence, now it is a “lung cancer specialist and expert in the arcane branch of health insurance known as utilization management.” (Upbin, 2013a) In addition, it is important to mention that he already has patients in several hospitals in the USA. To make it more affordable for hospitals, the size of the Watson was reduced from a size of a bedroom to a size of a pizza server which any hospital can afford managing. (Upbin, 2013a)

As a result of all technological innovations, IBM Watson gives very good results, which are much better than any other machine diagnoses: it is “accurate in its decisions 90%.” (Upbin, 2013a) Right now “Watson isn’t taking over the work from doctors,” (Upbin, 2013b) but one should understand that in the near future a certain segment of jobs in the health-care system will be obsolete due to automatization process.

One of the primary goals of IBM Watson is to diagnose and form a suitable treatment plan for cancer patients. To fulfill this goal, Watson has been used in Anderson Cancer Center for over 3 years “to help doctors match patients with clinical trials, observe and fine-tune treatment plans, and assess risks as part of M. D. Anderson’s ‘Moon Shots’ mission to eliminate cancer.” (Greenemeier, 2013) Unfortunately, due to the facts that “only a handful of published articles are high-quality, randomized trials,” (Jaklevic, 2017) and “in many cases, oncologists have to choose between drugs that have never been directly compared in a randomized trial,” (Jaklevic, 2017) it will take Watson a lot of time to learn what kind of drugs can be used in a particular case, for a particular patient, and, as a consequence, it will take a while for the project to show its potential and to actually start helping people.

Despite all problems, Watson is developing at an unprecedented speed. It will not take too much time for Watson to be developed to a state when it will not need a human help. Therefore, because of total autonomy and ability to work in the cloud, the health-care economics will be shattered: not only a lot of jobs will be obsolete, but there is a chance that the presence of medical centers will not be necessary for humans. One of the possible ways of development of Watson is either an online service of diagnosing or a physical device which will not only derive its conclusion from patient’s feeling, but also from some medical checks, like a blood work. Eventually, the whole diagnosing will come to the state when every person will have a personal medical pod which will use an advanced artificial intelligence like Watson to diagnose any diseases.

Watson in Business

Despite the fact that health-care is definitely an extremely important area of concentration for the IBM Corporation, they also pay a lot of attention to business. One of the main goals of IBM and IBM Watson, in particular, is to create a working environment that will enhance human abilities and improve their communication skills inside a project in order for them to become “more effective, not merely more efficient.” (IBM Corp, 2016)

With IBM Watson the company made an attempt to improve such fundamental elements of work as “creating and consuming content, working in teams, planning and prioritizing, collaborating and communicating, following processes.” (IBM Corp, 2016) Not only does IBM provide an environment for employees to communicate with each other, keep and update their plans and goals, but it also provides a cognitive system that can understand, analyse and structure the information from “audio, video, images and conversations,” (IBM Corp, 2016) sources which used to be unavailable for previous types of business computer solutions. Because of the ability of the cognitive system to understand and produce the written human language, to learn and adapt to new terms and jargons, to understand the meaning of a text, rather than just symbols, it greatly helps employees to highlight the most important information by eliminating noise and interruptions. (IBM Corp, 2016) For different jobs, Watson provides different tools to improve their skills and abilities, but the main purpose of the system is to structure the information in an understandable way.

In addition to the business environment, IBM allows software developers to use the power and abilities of Watson in their own projects. One example of such projects is a “Chef Watson” cooking application which uses the cognitive abilities of the IBM’s system in order to create new unique recipes based on your personal preferences. For now, “neither IBM nor Bon Appétit is claiming that Chef Watson can replace the judgment of an experienced home chef,” (Wilson, 2014) but there is no doubt that in the near future home cooks like “Chef Watson” will replace home chefs, doing their job faster and with more creativity.

Conclusion

As you could see, IBM Watson has a huge potential in a lot of different areas: healthcare, business, education, marketing, social sciences, and so on. The most important thing to remember is that Watson is a new type of computer system which can read, understand, and think, which makes us closer to the creation of an artificial intelligence than ever before.

The implications of Watson in healthcare are not noticeable right now, but with a proper research team, Watson will achieve enormous results in the future, which will shatter the world’s healthcare. Diagnosing and cancer plans are only a small part of what Watson will be able to do. Because of that, a lot of jobs will become obsolete, so doctors have to closely monitor results and achievements that Watson obtains.

Because business is such an important topic these days, it is of the most importance to keep track of researches that relate to the business environment in any way. For example, it is clear that Watson will have a lot of different impacts in the sphere of business, therefore everyone should keep an eye on this project.

Although IBM Watson is not that much developed yet to make any jobs obsolete or to change people’s lives, there definitely will be a time when the automatization process will shatter the world economics, and people must be prepared for it.

Article link: overleaf.com

Bibliography

(Brodkin, 2010) Brodkin, J. (Feb 10, 2010). IBM's Jeopardy-playing machine can now beat human contestants. Network World. Retrieved May 9, 2017.

(IBM Watson, 2014) IBM Watson. (Oct 7, 2014). IBM Watson: How it Works [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xcmh1LQB9I

(Chaudhry, 2012) Chaudhry, B. (2012) Putting Watson to Work: Watson in Healthcare. IBM. Retrieved November 11, 2013.

(Upbin, 2013a) Upbin, B. (Feb 8, 2013). IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare. Forbes. Retrieved May 11, 2017.

(Upbin, 2013b) Upbin, B. (Oct 18, 2013). IBM's Watson Now Tackles Clinical Trials At MD Anderson Cancer Center. Forbes. Retrieved May 11, 2017.

(Greenemeier, 2013) Greenemeier, L. (Nov 13, 2013) Will IBM’s Watson Usher in a New Era of Cognitive Computing?. Scientific American. Retrieved May 15, 2017.

(Jaklevic, 2017) Jaklevic, M. (Feb 23, 2017) MD Anderson Cancer Center’s IBM Watson project fails, and so did the journalism related to it. Healthnewsreview. Retrieved May 15, 2017.

(IBM Corp, 2016) IBM Corp. (2016) Watson Work: Imagine the future you want. Retrieved May 16, 2017 from https://www.ibm.com/watson/work/

(Wilson, 2014) Wilson, M. (30 Jun 2014) IBM’s Watson Is Now A Cooking App With Infinite Recipes. Fastcodesign. Retrieved May 16, 2017.

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Article: Universities shouldn’t force students to attend classes

апреля 05, 2017
By Unknown
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The quality of education and, as a consequence, students’ knowledge and understanding of university level subjects dramatically diminish throughout the time. This causes educational institutions as well as federal departments of education to think about how they can improve the quality of students’ knowledge. One of the first questions which comes to everybody’s mind is whether students should be forced to attend lectures or not. Japan and USA are the examples of those countries where attending classes is mandatory for all students. In my opinion, this requirement is very straightforward and should be seriously reconsidered.

First of all, every person ought to know that university is not a school or a kindergarten and that it takes a lot of time and effort to successfully receive a degree. Students choose to attend university themselves, so they must know how to manage enough time for studying as well as understand what type of studying is appropriate for them. Otherwise, if students aren’t able to do it, they are not yet ready for the university education or they probably don’t need it. These people must be expelled from a university so they will not distract other students. This behavior doesn’t differ from the one that is necessary at most of the jobs: most of the time, the employee has a task to fulfill and the employer doesn’t give him the list of instructions of how to manage this problem, but expect his employee to solve the problem no matter what. If the person doesn’t fulfill his duties, he will be dismissed. Students are considered to be adults, so they have to follow the same rules. It relates not only to the education in general but also to exams, finals, and projects in particular. If the person has not shown up, then the only solution is either to rate his work as F or, if the education system allows, to mark him as absent.

Second, even if the mentioned requirement works fine for lazy students, it may demotivate those students who are very productive and goal oriented, but who have their own pace. Moreover, the fact that a university lets students decide whether they want to visit classes or not shows that administration trusts its students, treat them as adults and expect them to behave appropriately.

Finally, so much attention to the student’s attendance may seem like a university is concentrated on the vision of hard work more than on actual education. This fact can make good students think about other universities.

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Article: "Metaphysics: Consciousness"

января 24, 2017
By Unknown
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Nowadays, we are experiencing a boom of work on the topic of artificial intelligence. The most popular question is “when will we create a fully artificial intelligence?”. The general population interested in this topic know almost nothing about it and, therefore, have very high expectations of this field. Before being able to create such a unique system as an artificial intelligence, people have to understand what AI is: do we have a consciousness which helps us to make our own decisions, or do all of us follow some algorithm that we are not aware of?

This motivation of exploring the field, to create an artificial intelligence, is, perhaps, very dangerous for humanity as it is impossible to predict the behavior of the AI and whether it is dangerous for humanity or not. One thing can be said for sure, the existence of the Internet in our world and the fact that more and more devices and houses become “smart”, potentially gives the AI almost ultimate power over humans as it would be able to control almost every aspect of our lives.

Fortunately, not all people are interested in AI as a step to create a controlling AI which would become our driver, guard, and chef. There are those people who are just curious about the idea that people are unique creatures and we don’t follow any sophisticated algorithm of behavior, as well as those who want to prove the opposite, that we are not that unique and that we ourselves can be part of a large simulation.

This idea is called the “Simulation hypothesis”. The main idea of this hypothesis is that all our universe and everything that is inside of it, including humans, is nothing more than a very big and computationally difficult computer simulation (1).

If humans ever succeed in creating such a program that will simulate a consciousness, then it’s possible that our universe, humanity and our consciousness is a larger simulation. Nowadays, scientists are trying to create a digital version of an animal brain from scratch, which is based on studies of real species “First digital animal will be a perfect copy of real worm” (1). So, there is a chance that in a while we will be able to create a real animal and even a human being in a virtual reality (1).

There are two projects that are currently in the process of development: robotics version of the worm, and a full digital copy of the worm. Both of these projects are very interesting from the scientific perspective. The first project resulted in a plastic Lego robot with two wheels which “trundles forward, encounters a wall, stops, reverses” (4). At first sight, there is nothing special in this behavior, except the fact that this robot was never programmed to “tell it when to stop and when to turn” (4). But, this robotic version of a worm has a precise copy of the worm’s brain, it has the same amount of cells as a real nematode brain, the same amount of neurons, and synopsis. The other project is a cell-for-cell digital copy of the worm, living in a virtual reality. Both projects work with the “simplest, smallest brain that we know of – the one that is inside the nematode worm Caenorhabditis Elegans” (4). This is a very unique organism because it has an extremely easy structure, it consists of only 959 cells, yet 80 percent of its genes are the same as humans’ ones. These projects have very specific goals which are “more than just a technical challenge” (4), which is also very important, because as John Long, a roboticist and neuroscientist at Vassar College in New York State, says -- “The mere act of trying to put a working model together causes us to realise what we know and what we don’t know” (4). One of the most important and uncomfortable questions that these projects pose is “if a digital model is an exact replica of a living animal, is it then alive” (4).

According to Anil Ananthaswamy in (1), we will not be able to find out whether we are a part of a simulation or not, because if we are inside of the system, we can’t observe anything outside of it, and therefore the “outside” doesn’t exist for us. But one of the questions that we can possibly try to attack is where a robust experience that “I exist” comes from.

It turned out that an analysis of the Cotard’s syndrome, “in which people are convinced that they do not exist” (1), can shed some light on it. Scientists published their studies of a person with Cotard’s. The results showed that there was an anomaly “in a brain network normally associated with internal awareness, including the awareness of our body and its emotional state” (1). This part of a brain network functioned as if a person was unconscious. The research supposed that this abnormal brain activity caused this perception of non-existence.

Researchers proposed an idea that our brain “generates a feeling of existence”(1) by perceiving our body and all its different states (1). Our brain works, in fact, like a very complicated prediction machine, because it analyzes all signals that the brain permanently receives and simultaneously predicts what caused these signals. Anil Ananthaswamy provides an example of this prediction in (1): “when you are walking by the coast, the brain has to be able to perceive that you are about to come to a cliff – if you don’t, you may fall off the edge”. To be able to achieve this behavior, the brain has to store internal models of the world, body, and the knowledge or prior experience of the world (in the particular example -- physical laws). Moreover, in order to make accurate predictions and computations, the brain has to maintain the integrity of its “virtual” world. “The brain is a system that is continually trying to prove its own existence,” says Metzinger (1).

There is one even more important question that we can possibly try to answer. Cotard’s syndrome eliminates the feeling of existence, but a person still experiences himself as a unique human being, as an “I” (2). Some scientists tend to think that this concept of “I” is the “by-product of consciousness itself” (2). This is a very important topic to explore, because if it is true that the concept of “I” is the by-product of consciousness, then simulating the consciousness, we will be able to simulate the unique personality that will think about itself as “I”.

René Descartes, a famous mathematician of the 17th century, the person who gave birth to the analytical geometry, also influenced neuroscience. One of the most famous of his opinions is the idea that “the body and conscious mind are two different substances: the first is made of matter, the latter is immaterial” (2). The field has moved on since that time, and “nowadays it’s widely accepted by most of the scientists that the brain gives rise to consciousness” (2), it’s not proven though.

David Chalmers at New York University claims this problem as a “hard” one because it is unclear “how physical networks of neurons can produce experiences that appear to fall outside the material world”.

Those people, who are working on this problem are divided into two camps: those, who think, that consciousness is something real, and those who think that it is a mirage and it actually doesn’t exist, and therefore there is no problem (2).

The opinion of the first camp is that consciousness is a fundamental component of the universe and it stands alongside real matter, therefore it “cannot be explained by our present understanding of physics” (2).

Even in this hypothesis, scientists have a few logical problems, because sometimes consciousness can interact with the real matter, e.g. “conscious desire to move your arm results in physical movement” (2). “But the fundamentals of how this happens remain hazy” (2).

Those people from the second camp argue that consciousness is “nothing but a trick of the mind,” (2) and that the mind also creates both an immaterial “I” and the feeling of a conscious experience when these immaterial things don’t exist (2).

Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett and other “materialists” try to explain how the brain performs this trick. One of the opinions is that consciousness is “the brain’s way of describing to itself what it means to pay attention to and deeply process a signal” (2).

Moreover, most materialists think that after the death there is nothing left, which means that our immaterial “I” doesn’t really exist, it’s just an illusion (2).

In sum, it can be concluded that nowadays scientists are working hard in the field of consciousness in order to understand its roots and even simulate it. Although researchers don’t have any bad intentions to create a fully functional AI, their curiosity in the field doesn’t let them think a lot about what consequences can arise if they were to succeed in their work. The project “OpenWorm”, in which researchers try to replicate a particular type of a worm in a virtual environment, resulted in a very promising project, which already gave some very interesting and important results, such as, for example, the ability of the brain to detect borders of the placement where this worm dwells, even though there was no teaching process that would explain such a behavior. Such projects like “OpenWorm”, which explore how animals’ brains work, may help people to better understand how they live and what they think, and maybe use this information for our benefit in some practical applications, for example in medicine, in future.

Even though people have worked on the problem of understanding consciousness since the 17th century with almost no progress in this field, there is still a hope that we will get valuable results studying such diseases like Cotard’s syndrome. There are a lot of problems that humans should answer before we will be able to achieve some serious results in this area, what is the concept of “I” and how it relates to consciousness are examples of such questions that should be answered.

Because a lot of people these days are working hard on this type of problems, there is a chance that we will be able to create a conscious being in a computer environment.