Insights June 21st, 2017

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In the EXPONENTIAL MINDS’ Artificial Intelligence Bulletin – The Healthcare Advantage we see how AI will change healthcare, considerations on strong frameworks, a Chinese finance giant taking advantage of AI, replacing oncologists, and hindering technological progression.

Where Artificial Intelligence Will Pay Off Most in Health Care

Of all the places where artificial intelligence is gaining a foothold, nowhere is the impact likely to be as great—at least in the near term—as in healthcare. A new report from Accenture Consulting, entitled Artificial Intelligence: Healthcare’s New Nervous System, projects the market for health-related AI to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 40% through 2021—to $6.6 billion, from around $600 million in 2014.

In that regard, the Accenture report, authored by senior managing director Matthew Collier and colleagues, echoes earlier assessments of the market. A comprehensive research briefing last September by CB Insights tech analyst Deepashri Varadharajan, for example—which tracked AI startups across industries from 2012 through the fall of 2016—showed healthcare dominating every other sector, from security and finance to sales & marketing. Varadharajan calculated there were 188 deals across various healthcare segments from Jan. 2012 to Sept. 2016, worth an aggregate $1.5 billion in global equity funding.

Read more at FORTUNE

UK digital minister: AI needs a ‘strong framework that carries the legitimate consent of the people’

UK digital minister Matt Hancock hinted on Tuesday that the government will look to start regulating companies and scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking at the CogX AI conference in London, Hancock stressed the potential that AI has to change the world we live in but said that the technology must be regulated by a suitable framework.
“We need to make sure that there is a strong framework that carries the legitimate consent of the people but that can allow and encourage innovation and can be flexible and move fast too,” Hancock said.
He added: “Some might say we should get out of the way and allow the technology to develop. Some say that the risks around the technology are too great and that we should not encourage development at all. But I would reject both of these extreme arguments.
Read more at Business Insider

Meet the Chinese Finance Giant That’s Secretly an AI Company

If you get into a car accident in China in the near future, you’ll be able to pull out your smartphone, take a photo, and file an insurance claim with an AI system.
That system, from Ant Financial, will automatically decide how serious the ding was and process the claim accordingly with an insurer. It shows how the company—which already operates a hugely successful smartphone payments business in China—aims to upend many areas of personal finance using machine learning and AI.
The e-commerce giant Alibaba created Ant in 2014 to operate Alipay, a ubiquitous mobile payments service in China. If you have visited the country in recent years, then you have probably seen people paying for meals, taxi rides, and a whole lot more by scanning a code with the Alipay app. The system is far more popular than the wireless payments systems offered in the U.S. by Apple, Google, and others. The company boasts more than 450 million active users compared to about 12 million for Apple Pay.
Read more at MIT Technology Review

Vinod Khosla predicts AI will replace human oncologists

While much of the conversation around AI and jobs is focused on widespread job losses in sectors like trucking, venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla thinks that there’s a high-paying job on the chopping block: oncology.
“I can’t imagine why a human oncologist would add value, given the amount of data in oncology,” he said during a panel conversation hosted by MIT in San Francisco today. “They can’t possibly comprehend all of the things that are possible.”
His comments were part of a broader point that education will not be enough to stem the economic upheaval and job loss that comes about as part of the growth of artificial intelligence. He doesn’t believe that human radiologists will exist in five years as a result, for example.
Khosla is in line with a group of other technologists who expect to see massive change as a result of increased automation. In his view, the future will likely require a re-evaluation of capitalism’s effectiveness and goals relative to economic abundance and inequality.
Read more at VentureBeat

Life imitating art: fear of AI is hindering technology progression

Automation is here to stay. In fact, it has already taken residence in people’s homes, with more and more digital assistants, such as Alexa, Cortana, Echo and Siri, being purchased with the hope they can make our lives easier.
Driverless cars will soon be on our driveways; fridges will restock and homes will heat themselves. With increasing reliance on these technologies, humans run the risk of becoming the morbidly obese citizens portrayed in WALL-E.
Is there a darker side to humans (other than weight gains) giving away their control though? If the popular sci-fi thriller, Westworld – a TV series where androids malfunction and kill humans – is anything to go by then the future could become a scary place for humans. In fact, fiction could be closer to reality than many of us would care to admit.
Read more at Information Age
 

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