I'm pretty skeptical about "cognitive computing." It's hard even for people to "cognitively compute." In fields like medicine, only the brightest, most educated and experienced people are capable of producing useful results. But when they do, the results can be powerful, useful and save lives.
Cognitive Computing
I've worked closely with computers since I was in my teens. I've seen their impact on society, and the huge productivity gains when properly applied. But ever since the early days, a subset of the computer industry and the public has insisted on seeing computers as versions of human brains. Periodically, the computer industry gets excited about how the latest computer hardware and software will enable computers to do things that only the smartest and most educated humans can do. When the excitement gets frothy, the movement is called something new, so no one will be "confused," and think it's the same as all the earlier, essentially identical movements that have failed and quietly faded away. The latest such movement is called "cognitive computing."
Medicine
Doctors who specialize in a field of study both contribute to advancing the state of the art and stay on top of advances made by others. Action-oriented review articles are particularly valuable -- they both summarize advances made by many people, and advance clinical practice by making those advances practical and actionable.
I'll take an example from emergency medicine, this journal in particular.
One of the articles that appeared in that journal earlier this year was about Horner's Syndrome in children.
There is lots of fascinating and useful information in the article. It's just amazing the things that go on in the human body. Knowing about all the things that sometimes go wrong makes it all the more impressive that most bodies work so well most of the time!
Here's a chart in the article that boils it all down. You've got a child presenting with Ptosis. What's going on here? There are a couple options, and the chart guides you to figuring it out.
One of the outcomes is Horner's Syndrome. What do you do next? Here's a chart that makes it all clear.
This example of human-implemented "cognitive computing" is similar in principle to many valuable intellectual and scientific results. It's the result of years of effort and study by many people handling many cases, and publishing the results. The advance here is boiling it all down and translating it into simple, unambiguous flowcharts that guide you to do the right thing, without leaving out anything important.
Can and should flowcharts like this be made available to front-line clinicians as they are seeing cases? Yes, of course, if only to enable the clinician to make sure something new hasn't emerged since last time he/she checked. Does it require fancy computing to make this happen? It does not.
Conclusion
Getting simple results like these is amazingly tough work for highly educated and motivated human beings. Meanwhile, computers are not yet capable of tying my shoes. When they are, I will gladly put them in the running for doing something more sophisticated and important, like picking who should have the lead role in the next James Bond movie. "Reading" the medical literature and figuring out how to respond when a child presents with ptosis? The crew that can't even keep a hospital's critical computer systems running is going to one-up humans? Maybe it's something you'll welcome for your child; for mine, I'll pass on the opportunity, thanks very much.
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