First we had this:
Artificial intelligence: augmenting or replacing doctors?
Authored by Jane McCredie
“ARTIFICIAL intelligence [AI] could put doctors and lawyers OUT of a job in FIVE YEARS’ time,” trumpeted a headline in Britain’s Express earlier this year.
Could it be true?
There’s no doubt technology is radically changing the nature of work across most areas of human endeavour.
One of the many challenges confronting us as a society is the question of how to distribute meaningful employment, and the wealth associated with it, in a world where we just won’t need as much human labour as we used to.
We often assume that the jobs that will be lost will be mostly unskilled, but perhaps we’re kidding ourselves.
As machines become more “intelligent”, able not just to follow the rules we’ve given them but to continually improve their performance by learning from mistakes, they will inevitably expand their reach into new areas.
Intelligent systems are being developed that may match or even outperform radiologists in examining brain scans for stroke risk, or pathologists in assessing biopsies.
While that might be worrying news for the next generation of diagnostic specialists, it does offer hope for greater equality in access to health services (to diagnosis at least, if not to resulting treatment).
Intelligent machines will be able to diagnose far more quickly than any human, potentially processing thousands of images a day and making early diagnosis available to anybody with a smart phone.
A group of Stanford computer scientists and medical experts published an article in Nature this year that showed that their AI system matched dermatologists in its ability to distinguish both melanomas from benign naevi and keratinocyte carcinomas from benign keratoses.
Lots more here:
Then we had this:
Artificial intelligence gives robots and autonomous machines a future
- The Australian
- 12:00AM August 3, 2017
Chris Griffith
It’s 2050 and you’re not allowed to drive. In fact, you’ve forgotten how. And you can’t get a licence anyway. Fitness devices and computers monitor your health daily. Even the toilet analyses what you offer up to check for disease. And you, like many, have had your genes sequenced. You know the diseases you’ll likely face in life.
Marilyn Monroe is back starring in movies via an avatar program that talks and acts like her, with machines having learned her speech and mannerisms from her films.
Indeed, there will be a bot version of us that lingers on after we die, that reads our will to relatives and friends, and consoles them. Maybe you can toast yourself at your wake. A bad bot version may be out-and-about settling old scores.
Computers hire and fire, and planes, trains and ghost ships crisscross the world without any humans aboard.
Do you like this future? Is it plausible? Or is it the work of an overly fertile imagination?
Much depends on who makes the predictions because futurists are a mixed bunch. Some are fiction writers with a sense of tomorrow and beyond. Some have a sociology background and see us moving in these directions.
Some have a technology background and their predictions are an extrapolation of what’s possible with tech today. Their predictions are scary because they are likelier to be right.
When the futurist is an eminent Australian professor of artificial intelligence, it’s even more frightening. Such is the case in It’s Alive! Artificial Intelligence From the Logic Piano to Killer Robots, a new book by Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of NSW and a leader in research at Data61, Australia’s centre for information and communications technology research.
“There are few other human inventions that are likely to have as large an impact on our lives as machines that can think,” he says. The frightening truth, he adds, is that AI is already an indispensable part of our lives without most of us realising it.
Lots more here:
Then this:
4 August 2017
Your kid will play with AI friends and learn from VR teachers
Kids of the future will have artificial buddies, virtual reality teachers or robot nannies. Digital technologies are radically transforming the relationship between children. As I have a six-months-old daughter, I decided to map how our future – mine as a father and hers – and the future of parenting could look like in the light of new innovations.
Digital technologies change social relations
Disruptive technologies are shaping the way we work, we eat, we do shopping or find information. It changes healthcare under the transformation called digital health. Not only the access to and delivery of care, but also the doctor-patient relationship. Namely, it alters the quality of a social linkage which was relatively stable for centuries.
Why would that be different in the most important area of our lives, the family? The rapid swirls of technology started to change the relationship between grandparents, parents, and children. For a while in the past centuries, knowledge about how to survive in the world went down from generation to generation. And while the youth revolted against their adults as part of growing up, the basics of their experiences remained untouched. What having a job, having a family and friends or living in a community meant. Digital technologies change these social experiences profoundly. While your grandparents probably taught your parents how to read maps for finding their way out in cities, you use digital maps. And you are the one showing your parents how to do that on their iPhones. It is the same for taking photos, applying for jobs or chatting with friends.
Digital natives on the rise
The number of young adults and kids who were born surrounded by digital environments or are using digital technology for 5 years or more already – the definition of digital natives by ITU – is growing exponentially. In 2013, ITU estimated that 30 per cent of the world’s youth, meaning 363 million people were digital natives. They suggested that over the next five years, the number of digital natives will more than double. Behind the soaring number stands the decrease in the price coupled with the geographical extension of digital technologies as well as the drop in the age of users. In the most wired areas, it is not strange to see small children watching the same cartoon on their parents’ laptop or tablet repeatedly for hours or taking silly photos of snails with smartphones.
And then from overseas there was this:
Cognitive computing will bring increased intelligence to EHRs
July 26, 2017
The typical electronic health record (EHR) system holds more information than any one person could analyze, as do all the medical journals and medical data repositories that exist.
But physicians could soon leverage all of that information to make better decisions, according to leading health IT experts, as EHRs and other healthcare software systems begin to incorporate cognitive computing.
Cognitive computing, a branch of artificial intelligence, harnesses self-learning systems, data mining, natural language processing and other technologies to analyze information, identify patterns and draw conclusions – just as the human mind does, only on a vastly larger scale and speed.
The result will be computers that act more like virtual assistants than data-entry systems.
“Cognitive computing will impact how we deliver care, it will impact clinical workflows and it will impact other spaces within the physician business as well,” said Todd Evenson, MBA, chief operating officer at the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA).
“It’s able to identify outputs that a physician didn’t necessarily think of,” said Ian E. Hoffberg, applied innovation manager, health information systems, for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
More here:
All I can say is that effort brings reward we are going to see some big changes coming soon!
David.
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