AIs and Healthcare by Diane Burton

When I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, the HAL 9000 computer really scared me. Could an Artificial Intelligence become so smart it would kill humans to stay alive? That had to be a worst-case scenario for AIs.

photo credit: IMDB

 

What about The Terminator sent by Skynet?

 

photo credit: IMDB

AIs can be scary in science fiction movies and books. I recently started reading The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Fascinating stories about an android, designed to be an assassin, who becomes self-aware.

 

photo credit: Amazon

One of the things I enjoyed about the Terminator movies was the humor. “I’ll be back.” In my Outer Rim series, starting with The Pilot, Celara’s sidekick and copilot android adds much needed humor during stressful situations. I loved writing RJ and incorporated him in the other books in the series.

 

While AIs are fun or scary in science fiction, science is using artificial intelligence in many useful ways. One way is to forecast future disease outbreaks and pandemics. Considering the current pandemic, I found it interesting that a health monitoring AI, Bluedot, issued warnings about the spread of covid-19 before the WHO and the CDC.

 Imagine reading through heath reports from throughout the world. How long would it take you or me to find trends? Days, months, years? An AI platform could do that so much faster. Like lightning quick. Then those trends could be analyzed by epidemiologists and, hopefully, give us earlier warnings.

 AIs thrive on data. But in the end, humans need to know what to do with what the AIs tell us. They analyze the trends, issue advice and/or warnings, preparing us for whatever dangers lie ahead. Of course, we need to pay attention to those warnings and act accordingly.

  

If you’re curious, here are a couple of articles you might find interesting about AIs and Heathcare.

 

https://medicalfuturist.com/7-things-you-can-expect-from-a-i-in-healthcare/

https://medicalfuturist.com/how-digital-health-technology-can-help-manage-the-coronavirus-outbreak/