You're out of touch if you believe medicine will remain unscathed amid the rise of artificial intelligence, he insists
So you thought that
My Health Record was complicated and risky? In the digital revolution, it is
chicken feed.
Steady yourself and
gird your loins, because artificial intelligence (AI) is the big game that’s
coming to town soon and it can be challenging.
How close are we? A
statement in the IT world called Moore’s law observes that the number of
transistors that can be placed on a single integrated circuit doubles about
every two years.
It was named after
one of the co-founders of Intel, Gordon Moore, following his 1965 paper. It
means that the same-sized circuit you were using last year has doubled its
capacity this year.
According to
Google, your smartphone has enough computing power to fire a person to the
moon.
How long Moore’s
law will apply is unknown because the space on printed circuits is finite, but
we do know that today’s computers have the same processing power as the human
brain.
In the August issue
of Foreign Affairs magazine, Kevin Drum, a 60-year-old
Californian political blogger and columnist who knows a lot about Silicon
Valley, credits the immense social progress of the 19th century to the
Industrial Revolution.
“Without it,
there’s no capitalist revolution because agrarian states don’t need one.
Without it, there’s no rising middle class and no real pressure for democracy,”
he wrote in an essay called ‘Welcome to the
Digital Revolution'.
“The key drivers of
this era were the steam engine, germ theory, electricity and railroads.”
And now? The
computers to support AI are ready.
Their power is
measured in floating point operations — known in the trade as ‘flops’ — which
basically means that they work very fast. For example, one second is the
equivalent of about 10-100 petaflops.
The capacity of the
human brain is said to be able to handle 100 petaflops per second. That is, it
can perform 100,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second.
According to Mr
Drum: “A computer with this capacity, unfortunately, is the size of a living
room, costs $200 million and generates electricity bills of about $5 million (a
year).”
Software
development is critical and AI experts say there is a 50% chance that AI will
be able to perform all human tasks by 2060, he adds.
“The digital
revolution is going to be the biggest geopolitical revolution in human
history”, he says, adding that PricewaterhouseCoopers has predicted that 38% of
all jobs in the US are at high risk of automation by the early 2030s.
The effects on
human employment will be profound.
Within a decade, he
says, long-haul truck drivers will be displaced by driverless technology and
similar technology will knock out the jobs the displaced drivers might have
taken up. We need new politics.
Anyone imagining
that medicine and medical practice will not be profoundly altered is out of
touch.
Our eldest son
Nick, a vice-president with Google, recently told me that the AI development of
the driverless car was now sophisticated enough to engage in ethical reasoning.
For example, how
should an AI-driven vehicle respond to an impending crash where either the
humans in that car, or the colliding vehicle, will sustain a fatal injury? With
sacrifice, altruism or self-interest?
And, if ethical
reasoning can be used by AI for driving, then why not in medicine?
The two most
important developments for the 21st century will be AI-driven mass unemployment
and fossil-fuel-driven climate change, Mr Drum says.
A glimmer of hope
is that AI might be able to solve climate change by scaling up wind and solar
power.
But what about
medicine? Now, there’s the challenge for us doctors.
At the very least,
our medical education should accommodate more about the interface between
practice and AI.
This must go way
beyond the simplicities of how to use IT to include debating and considering
the implications for what we do as doctors in this brave new world.
What will ethical
practice mean and how will we relate to AI in this pursuit?
It’s time for a lot
of serious and creative thinking.
Source: Foreign Affairs 2018, online .
Related reading:
Published in The Medical Observer 13 August 2018 https://bit.ly/2PnMULp
