Interpreting The Future Of Healthcare

Watson’s Jeopardy triumph understandably prompted some people to imagine scary scenarios of machines taking over from human beings, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey or the robots in Terminator. Less spectacular and more scary, there’s a lot of concern about increasingly intelligent machines taking over whole categories of work. Even luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have sounded warning notes about machines taking over. Who knows? For the moment, our experience of cognitive computing has been that it complements human capacities rather than replaces them. This is a boon in industries where there’s intensive use of human brain power, such as medicine and healthcare marketing. Cognitive computing will enable us to do what we already do better, and to create new service offerings that are just not possible yet.