I recently wrote about five technologies that are shaping the future of healthcare. One of these technologies -- artificial intelligence -- holds particular potential for improving medical care at the clinical level.
Thanks to the digital revolution, medical professionals don’t have to memorize nearly as much information as they did 50 years ago. Digital technology has liberated physicians, nurses and researchers to focus more mental energy on higher-level cognitive tasks and patient care. Artificial intelligence is poised to take this to the next level.
The medical field must learn to better delegate repetitive, lower-level cognitive functions in order to allow medical professionals to focus more of their mental energy on higher-level thinking.
To understand this need, let’s start by looking at a quote from J.C.R. Licklider’s 1960 paper Man-Computer Symbiosis:
“About 85% of my ‘thinking’ time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it … Several hours of calculating were required to get the data into comparable form. When they were in comparable form, it took only a few seconds to determine what I needed to know.”
Herbert A. Simon captured a similar idea when he coined the phrase bounded rationality. The idea is that human decision making is at its best when people are given limited, relevant information and enough time to process the information.
Computers allow us to optimize our decision-making faculties by granting us easier access to information that is critically relevant to a decision while sorting out non-relevant facts or data. Humans now spend less time trying to decide what information to look at and can spend more time applying our minds’ higher-level computational abilities to the information before us.
As AI continues to advance, it has the potential to extend the power of human thinking in three critical areas: advanced computation, statistical analysis and hypothesis generation. These three areas correspond to three distinct waves within AI development.
First-Wave AI
