Expert systems have played a large role in many industries including in financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, customer service, transportation, video games, manufacturing, aviation and written communication. Two early expert systems broke ground in the healthcare space for medical diagnoses: Dendral, which helped chemists identify organic molecules, and MYCIN, which helped to identify bacteria such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics and dosages.
A more recently developed expert system, ROSS, is an artificially-intelligent attorney based on IBM’s Watson cognitive computing system. ROSS relies on self-learning systems that use data mining, pattern recognition, deep learning and natural language processing to mimic the way the human brain works.
Expert systems and AI systems have evolved so far that they have spurred debate about the fate of humanity in the face of such intelligence, with authors such as Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy at Oxford University, pondering if computing power has surpassed our ability to control it.
