[Advocacy Advisors] Wikipedia and ethics in medicine

[James Salsman]

Recently IBM announced that their Watson natural language processing
system will be used for "utilization management" decisions in lung
cancer treatment by health insurance company WellPoint at Memorial
Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center.

I would like to urge everyone to review
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilization_management -- it seems very
likely that Watson will be making treatment decisions similar to those
which have colloqually been rerred to as "death panel" decisions in
the US over the past four years.

The IBM Watson team has frequently stated that they rely on Wikipedia
in essentially all of their interpretation and question answering
processing, more than any other source.

What are the legal liability issues involved with an artificial
intelligence system based on Wikipedia making life-or-death medical
decisions?