Our Evolving Relationship With Artificial Intelligence And Health Care Posted on : Jan 17 - 2019

We have created a world where our need to perform certain tasks has been greatly alleviated. But for a society enamored with technology and the need for the "next best thing" fueling some people's desires for personal advancement, are we creating a world where we are freely giving away that power? And if so, to whom (or what)?

As the founding CEO of a digital health company, I have worked with artificial intelligence technologies in the clinical genomics space. Advancement for the sake of advancement is a noble belief, but in my opinion, it can sometimes lack a stable footing in reality. It’s a narrative that has been used to justify industrial modernity, and in doing so, it has become accepted as the recipe to the progression of our civilization.

Technology Timeline

If we look back in history, there are a handful of truly revolutionary movements and events that have shaped our modern world and relationship with technology. We saw the growing use of railroads and electricity, which changed the way we lived our daily lives. Then came the internet, which connected us. Now, most recently, AI is learning to be us.

I believe narrow AI — computers performing a narrow task, such as facial recognition or sifting through huge volumes of data — is a task that machines are better equipped to do than humans are. With that said, while AI can far surpass humans at gathering and learning from mass quantities of data, there will always be the need for a person to interpret that information and reason with a combination of logic and emotional intelligence to decide how best to use it.

Hype Versus Hope

When implementing an AI platform, it’s important to consider how the technology will be most beneficial by asking the question: Is AI really for everyone, or just for the healthy and wealthy? While plagued by propaganda about robots taking over the world or creating a race of superhumans, it’s far more likely we’ll see AI trickle into the field of health care, and more specifically, genomics.

While there’s speculation from many, including the late Stephen Hawking, that we might be opening the door to an era of “self-designed evolution,” I believe the more likely scenario is that genetic changes “will be confined to the repair of genetic defects."

Similar to how skill is the sum of our experience, AI is the sum of the data it’s trained on. One of the first things we noticed about the field of rare diseases and genomics is that the data available was mainly representative of European descendants. There is very limited genomic data recorded for minority groups, such as people of Latin American or African descent. AI has the potential to reduce costs and democratize knowledge, but it has held limited value for developing countries. I believe the absence of data perpetuates, and even increases, the medical and technological gaps that already exist in health care between developed and developing countries. View More