From the book Cracking the
Code:
“One such application for Watson could be in the field of
medicine; Watson’s virtually limitless data storage capability combined with
its incredible recall ability makes it a natural diagnostician. Imagine if
Watson’s memory contained the medical history of every patient, as well as all
medical knowledge known to humans so far, including experimental treatments. If
provided with all the symptoms of a patient with a disease that doctors have
been unable to diagnose correctly, Watson could come up with a few likely
diagnoses as well as suggest the best course of action given the results from
thousands of previous cases.
Better still, if Watson had an additional module installed
that allowed it to extract all the information it needs from a patient’s blood
or tissue sample, it could be an all-in-one medical provider. Taking it one
step further, Watson could also be programmed to find certain patterns in
disease and treatment. Its vast database would be able to pick up trends and
patterns that may be too subtle for humans to detect.
In fact, IBM has already entered into a research agreement
with a company called Nuance
Communications, to explore, develop and commercialize Watson’s advanced
analytical capabilities in the healthcare industry. Nuance Communications
(NASDAQ: NUAN) has a market capitalization of over US$7 billion at the time of
writing and is trading at almost 50 times its trailing earnings, so clearly the
market strongly believes in the huge commercial opportunity that lies ahead in
this sector. The law would be another wonderfully powerful application for
Watson. Totally impartial, Watson the lawyer, or perhaps more controversially,
the judge would have access to every case in history as well as all the world’s
laws and legal systems. Think of how quickly and efficiently cases could be
heard and resolved. Most of all, think about the potential billions of dollars
saved in legal fees that would otherwise be racked up by using human lawyers!”
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