Posted November 20, 2019 13:08:10 Artificial intelligence is a term coined by the British philosopher Richard Rorty in 1950 to describe the phenomenon of machines that can learn to think like humans, using human-like reasoning and language.
Artificial intelligence was widely applied to everything from medicine to healthcare to games.
“What I like about it is that it has a huge amount of potential,” said Dr Richard Kurzweil, a Stanford University professor of computer science.
“The question is, how do we apply it to healthcare?”
In the past decade, AI researchers have applied AI to a range of fields, from building health-care systems to the detection of criminal behaviour.
The potential for medical AI has already led to the development of new ways of diagnosing and treating conditions such as cancer and dementia.
Dr Kurzwell said the current focus on healthcare AI could lead to the “very real and dangerous consequences” of medical negligence.
“If you take a look at the way that people are doing their medical care, the way they are administering drugs and treatments, they’re using a lot of different techniques,” he said.
“So you don’t want to use an AI system that’s just doing what a human would do, and that’s to take those human-level processes and put them in a machine-level system.”
The focus on medical AI was also highlighted by the recent release of a report from the International Federation of Medical Robotics, which identified three key problems with medical AI systems.
It warned of the “potential for massive harm” if these systems were used to diagnose diseases and treatments that were “simply not worth the effort”.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time,” Dr Kurwel said.
Dr Andrew Mott, the CEO of the AI research firm AIXI, said AI was not only the future of medicine, but also for society as a whole.
“AI can help us do much more,” Dr Mott said.
“[AI] is a technology that can improve our lives as well as the lives of others.”
“There are things that we can do for the environment and for health, and it is in the interest of all of us to look at AI in a holistic way.”
Dr Kurshwell agreed that the future lay with AI and healthcare AI.
“Healthcare AI is the future for us,” he says.
“We’re going to be able to do many more things with AI than we can with medical technology.”
Dr Motto, the author of the report, said the report’s recommendations for the future could be a guiding light for researchers to pursue.
“These are things we are not going to see happening tomorrow, but if we can learn from them and improve upon them, I think we can be very successful,” Dr Turek said.
Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare AI are both areas where there are large gaps between the research community and the general public, said Dr Kurth.
Dr Turer said the lack of public awareness and support for AI was “a problem”.
“It’s a problem because when you have this big gap, people just don’t know how to apply this to their lives,” he explained.
Dr Mote, who has also studied medical AI, said people had been slow to embrace the technology.
“They’ve been very slow to accept the idea that there are technologies that could potentially be used to improve their lives and their health,” he told the ABC.
Dr Aneel Kishore, an associate professor of computational biology at the University of California, Berkeley, said research into medical AI and other fields was becoming increasingly important to understand and to address.
“A lot of the research into AI in healthcare is very exciting,” he added.
“There’s still a lot to learn.”
Dr Trier, the AI researcher, said more research was needed to understand the benefits and limitations of AI and to develop better medical AI solutions.
“It will take time and investment in terms of people and resources to understand exactly what it is and how it works,” he concluded.
The ABC has decided not to run a live story about artificial intelligence in the future.
Topics:arts-and-entertainment,health,health-policy,healthcare-facilities,science-and,technology,technology-and_science,united-states
