Alien Intelligence Has Landed

The aliens are coming and they can help us.  With the information explosion, our human RAM is overloaded and bogged down.  We need an external drive and complementary, sophisticated software to make sense of it all and guide us toward a healthier future.  Indeed, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have given birth to robots that can learn to screw the cap on a bottle, even figuring out the need to apply a subtle backward twist to find the thread before turning it the right way.  This may seem like a minor task but the underlying, pioneering technologies will migrate to worthwhile applications in health and healthcare.

In health care, the increasing volume of data produced from scientific reports, medical records, and personal information has far outstretched human capacities to digest and make sense of it and to act upon it.   Help is on the way in the form of artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial is a strange term for what it has to offer. It may be produced in a seemingly nonhuman way, but rather than being artificial, it is quite genuine, albeit different in some ways. In fact, its greatest contribution may be what Kevin Kelly from Wired Magazine calls “alien” intelligence.

The promise of AI has been touted for decades. Twenty years ago, I was part of a team at GTE Labs that developed an AI system that analyzed health insurance claims data and provided an automated analysis of “multiple dimensions to determine the most interesting deviations of specific quantitative measures relative to norms and previous values...and generated simple recommendations for correcting detected problems.” Our reason for developing the system was that each time I wanted a report on health claims data, I paid a consulting firm tens of thousands of dollars. It seemed that this could be automated through good logic and code for routine analysis and reporting. It did a nice job and reduced consultant expenses.

Flash forward to realize that there is reason to believe that the long “AI winter” is nearly over and its capabilities are stronger and much more relevant. Eric Topol, in his new book, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands, states that “Computers will replace physicians for many diagnostic tasks.” Similarly, Alan Greene, chief medical officer of Scanadu, a start-up that is building a diagnostic device based on AI, says “At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.”   And Michael Ford, in his new book, Rise of the Robots:  Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, predicts that many high skilled jobs will be taken over by AI robots.  For example, he says that radiology will be a job performed by machines as computers are rapidly getting better at analyzing images.

The fact is that prominent technology companies like Google and Facebook have gone way beyond their standard search function to embed it with AI for intelligent search.  And according to Kelly, AI has attracted more than $17 billion in investments since 2009 and the “business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.”  The reasons for the breakthrough in AI are mostly due to converging advances in computing, including cheap parallel computation for immense computing power, big data fueling natural language engines making AI smarter, and better algorithms for deep learning.

On the one hand, AI will automate routine tasks better than the ubiquitous smart chips in everything from vacuum cleaners to dishwashers. In health care, this will include mining information stored in the EHR to provide real-time clinical support or mining the literature and the experiences of many providers and patients to recommend potential treatment options to physicians, as is being pioneered with applications from Modernizing Medicine. IBM has demonstrated the capabilities of AI for machines to outwit humans as with Deep Blue for winning chess or Watson for winning Jeopardy!  Ford also suggests that wearable medical devices are already monitoring “just about any kind of biometric data that can be collected in an I.C.U.”  McNeill, in his book Using Person-Centered Health Analytics to Live Longer, asserts that AI can offer significant functionality to finally engage people with personal digital health devices.

On the other hand, AI’s most useful feature may be decidedly unhuman. It will not just automate and accelerate what our brains usually do. It will think differently. This is partly because artificial intelligence learns from all the data and the decisions it makes. It will add wisdom because it will look at the world differently and offer new perspectives, thereby becoming irresistible and keeping us interested in learning more about how we do important things in our life, like living a long and healthy life.