Er was a famous player, a hero, the genius and the figurehead of intelligent machines: Dr. watson Eleven years ago, his star rose on American television. A “moon landing” for artificial intelligence, that’s how the then IBM CEO Ginni Rometty raved a few years later about the three glorious TV evenings in which Dr. Watson defeated the then undisputed “Jeopardy” game kings Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. His remarkable understanding of language and lightning-fast access to almost encyclopaedic knowledge, his ability to process huge amounts of data in parallel and to keep learning new things made Watson world-famous at the time. With these skills, he would then revolutionize medicine. In five years, Rometty announced after the founding of Watson Health, that the unattainable logic of Watson’s algorithms would be at work behind every medical decision.
It didn’t get that far. Rather, Dr. Watson now a fallen hero. The tech and financial industries are already scolding the unprofitable savior. It has been speculated since the beginning of the year that significant parts of Watson Health will be sold to a private equity company for a billion dollars. Hardly anything usable has come out of the fifty partnerships, for example with the famous Mayo Clinic or the American Cancer and Cardiology Societies. The technology market is hungry for health data: Ever since the parent company tried to sell the Watson Health Transfer as a small broken leg, Oracle and Microsoft have reported acquisitions from the medical data industry for many billions of dollars. Is artificial intelligence the bottleneck to success?