AI is a life-saving technology that we should not be afraid to embrace
AI may not be entirely trustworthy but it might just save your life
There are undoubtedly serious concerns about artificial intelligence. For example, speaking recently to the StarTalk podcast, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton warned that sometimes AI will “lie”.
“If it senses that it is being tested, it can act dumb... it acts differently from how it would act in normal life because it doesn’t want you to know what its full powers are apparently,” he said.
However, there are also extraordinary benefits. A woman from Aberdeen, Yvonne Cook, has now described how an AI scan spotted she had an aggressive form of breast cancer despite the tumour being so small that it was missed by medics. She was part of a clinical trial of the technology which found AI could increase detection rates by more than 10 per cent.
Commenting on the research, leading health expert Professor Ara Darzai said AI “has the potential to transform how the NHS prevents, detects and treats diseases like cancer”.
New technology can be scary, but we should never run scared, and instead keep moving forward, cautiously and carefully, but with an optimism based on past experience that any problems will be overcome.
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