Watson DeepQA, Price Performance, Daniel Kraft, Alcor Cheating Death
Take a look at how narrow artificial intelligence works and can rapidly evolve the industries of the world with David Ferrucci of IBM as he discusses “Building Watson - A Brief Overview of the DeepQA Project”.
Viewing exponential growth in time shows us when and how the vast contributions in many fields will make it possible to live forever without significant costs. Exponential growth in all of today’s technology reduces the cost of product performance in half very rapidly, an example of this is the smart phone, which allows information from the cloud and many apps that used to be whole industries whose products cost tens of thousands of dollars are now free apps. Information, analysis, and machines have the ability to consistently deliver increased performance while halving its price every 12 to 18 months.
To get an idea just how fast products are going down in cost here is a ten year percentage decrease scale. The first year the product price/performance ratio will cost 100%. The second year the improved ability of the product and its reduced price compared to the product’s original price/performance ratio will reduce the cost 50%. The beauty of new products today is that this constant improvement and cost reduction makes cutting edge products cheap within three to six years. Finishing the trend of price/performance ratio cost reduction you can see how widespread new technology will become as each year progresses and prices drop into the 3rd year 25%, 4th year 12.5% 5th year 6.26%, 6th year 3.12%, 7th year 1.56 %, 8th year 0.78%, 9th year 0.39%, and ten years later the same product performance will cost 0.19% of its original price. Now use that cost reduction on some of the newer and soon to be released products like the medical analyzer for personal use, called the tricorder. Tricorder sales will start as smart phone apps and attachments, a full-fledged medical tricorder will go commercial around 2017, each month more medical tests and improved analysis will be included with a tricorder.
Dr. Daniel Kraft, at TEDMED 2011, shows the changes that are helping to make personalized, preventative, and cost effective medicine happen now.
When computing systems are allowed access to large numbers of patients, then ongoing data can be analyzed as medications, diagnostics, and treatments are carried out live. Freely and quickly comparing medical data will bring about the subtle data that is needed so that we can begin the process to remove aging, along with its frailty, disease, loss of intelligence, pain, loss of personal wealth, and of course the death of 100,000 people a day. Our archaic paper medical records and proprietary electronic medical records are also stopping the massive data analysis that needs to start. If we open our medical files for analysis to figure out what works on whom, a new age of medicine will change everything. A collaborative effort is needed for computers to analyze the newest genomic, proteomic, gene expression, and methylation profiles and also compare healthy human microbiomes vs. the patient’s microbiome. All of these “omics” will shortly (2 to 5 years) hit the bioinformatics field clinically. We can only hope that intelligence will prevail and the old school of medicine incorporates artificial intelligence into being used as our vastly superior and cheaper “medical doctor” quickly.
Medicines business model is based on Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes for reimbursement whether the patient benefits or not, we call it healthcare, whether the patients’ health was made optimal or made worse.
Aging brings about, increased pain, frail and declining physical and mental states, financial bankruptcy, and death, while medicine uses outdated medical imaging, human analysis only slightly better than the flip of a coin, with a lack of “omic”, personalized, and regenerative medicine. As if that’s not bad enough, healthcare’s HIPPA regulations, paper medical records, and inaccessible proprietary electronic medical records, reduce and restrict desperately needed, large scale, personalized, preventative medicine clinical research, while making the individuals medical records difficult to continually access.
When faced with death though accidents or disease, cryonic preservation is the last alternative. The largest cryonics service is Alcor, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Once a member of Alcor has been declared legally dead, Alcor rescue teams immediately begin the processes to preserve the body so that they may be brought back to life when technology has advanced enough to correct the disease, or damage, and safely unvitrify the body. Vitrification is the method used to preserve bodies at very low temperatures with minimal damage to the cells of the body. Alcor’s services include sending out rescue teams to quickly preserve their member’s bodies, onsite storage of the vitrified members, advancing the science of body preservation, investigating techniques of reviving tissue post vitrification (cooling), and educating the public about cryopreservation. This is a video of Max Moore the CEO of Alcor, explaining the reasons for and process of cryopreservation.
