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The failure of IBM Watson Health Unit

https://blog.sepstream.com/reasons-why-ibm-watson-flopped-in-the-healthcare-industry/#:~:text=Another%20reason%20for%20Watson's%20failure,the%20hospital's%20own%20cancer%20treatments.

Today’s (3/20/2021) local newspaper (The Boston Globe) carries a story about the failure of an IBM division, The Watson Health Unit, which was launched a decade ago with much fanfare about using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve health care and medicine delivery. The story was written by a National health care reporter, Casey Ross, which you can google. But reading it requires subscription which you must remember to cancel within 30 days. Thus, I am summarizing it here for ScienceNet reader as a service and sequence to my blogs on AI in the past years.

1.          Too ambitious. AI not quite ready for general complex real world problems

2.          Too much marketing and not enough science

3.          Working on too many fronts

4.          Collecting data and integrating them is harder than one thinks due to different formats, nature of data (images, statistics, medical records, etc.)

5.          Focusing only on short term financial returns

It is a wake up call for AI enthusiasts believing the SINGULARITY had already arrived.