IBM to invest some serious money into Watson

Do you remember Watson, IBM's Jeopardy winner? Well, after its triumphal apparition in the game show, IBM tried to place it as a medical advisor, but so far, success hasn't been there.

Recently, the (big) blue company announced it would pour $1 billion into the business development, to help place the cyber doctor/advisor. A few reasons are presented for why sales have not skyrocketed.

This is interesting, as there were a number of initiative to bind machine learning with medicine. In several cases, the machine was able to find a better, i.e. more efficient or cheaper, than its flesh-and-bone counterpart. The underlying, unsaid reason (in my views) is that a machine doesn't partake in "sales" politics: it doesn't favour a specific brand nor does it try to "treat without curing".

Anyways, I really wish Watson become more of a success: with the explosion of diseases, such as autoimmune diseases or cancers, we really need to have all the brainpower we can have, both hardware and wetware.