In 2012, doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center partnered with IBM to train Watson to diagnose and treat patients. But according to IBM documents dated from last summer, the supercomputer has frequently given bad advice, like when it suggested a cancer patient with severe bleeding be given a drug that could cause the bleeding to worsen.
Source: IBM’s Watson gave unsafe recommendations for treating cancer
I don’t suggest that these findings aren’t problematic, or that isn’t essential for expert systems like Watson to improve in their diagnosis and prediction but I do feel that it’s a bit like blaming a medical student for not being perfect. Yes, Watson is still learning and won’t always get it right and yes, it can improve. But is it reasonable to hold these systems to standards of performance that we would never expect of human doctors (see the data on the human causes of medical error that lead to patient deaths).