IBM makes Watson the size of a pizza box, starts offering cloud access to doctors

When the robot uprising is finally underway, you might look back on the year 2011 as the beginning of the end. That was the year IBM’s Watson supercomputer trounced its squishy human opponents on the quiz show Jeopardy. Believe it or not, IBM didn’t spend millions of dollars to design an artificial intelligence that’s just really good at phrasing its responses in the form of a question. Watson is finally being utilized in the real world, and this might be just the beginning.

After a few months of working out details, IBM has entered into an arrangement with Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint to bring Watson’s expertise to the medical field. Doctors will be able to run the variables through Watson to get suggestions on possible treatments based on giant blocks of medical data. There’s no need to fret, though. Watson won’t be making the final decision on who lives and who dies — yet.

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