It's already been a decade since IBM's Supercomputer Watson beat two Jeopardy champions.

Now we come to Watson, who is Brad Stoker and the wager, hello 17,973 and a two-day total

of 77,147.

Then and now, a lot of people have wondered when will computers get smart enough to replace

us?

And if so, at what cost?

Enter the computer and a new age.

From the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is Freakonomics MD.

I'm Bob Ujena.

I'm a medical doctor and an economist.

Each episode, I dissect an interesting question at the sweet spot between health and economics.

Today on the show, it was always a matter of time before technological advances in computing

made their way into medicine.

The falling price of data storage and increases in computing speed laid the foundation for an

explosion in healthcare data.

And now, artificial intelligence or AI promises to make that data useful.

But are we actually at a place where AI can help doctors treat patients?

We throw around the term artificial intelligence a lot, but what does it really mean?

We're often interested in predicting something about the world, what's going to happen,

what's happening now, and that's exactly what Amazon does when they're showing you

a product.

They've made a prediction based on all of the data that they see about you, that you

...