Good question
cattletruck-
I had to think about your example for a while because a lot of my time is healthcare oriented- but I would have never imagined what I think of as near real time recommendations base on data mining at this point in hearth care-
The reason is that healthcare data hasn't been readily available (stuck in charts without incentives to make operational data available) and algorithms need volume to throw out the outliers to build the normal model.
But even with trends to change data capture, standards, and create a sharing infrastructure, I'm not sure that I would imagine the near real time analysis that we are talking about in the near future in health care- Heath providers have a lot more control of their clinical environment and they intentionally limit a lot of variables that are unrealistic in aviation.
I get the idea of data mining in health care- model building, identifying unimagined causality, it makes total sense, but I would have imagined this would be used for training and developing better procedures because I would imagine that heathcare outcomes are also far more deterministic.
On the other hand, if aviation had the equivalent to millions of labrats (= aircraft) that could be tested to the point of failure over and over for hundreds of years, and that data was collected, I would think the comparison would be closer?
In a way, that is what I am imagining... if thousands of drones are delivering pizza, we're going to see a lot more failures, the data sets get bigger, and cause or failure might lead to more traditional fixes (training and developing better procedures).
No idea if any of this fits your example, but I appreciate the analogy...