AI for the Next Billion
We attended Quartz’s The Next Billion conference this past week in San Francisco. Quartz describes The Next Billion as a metaphor for the future of the internet — both the exponential growth in connectivity in emerging markets and the growth of next-level technology in mature markets. It was a well put-together conference with a truly diverse range of speakers and a very diverse audience, making it feel a bit different to the usual Silicon Valley discussion. It also got us thinking, what are the top things that AI can do for the next billion people to get connected to the internet? There’s an embedded assumption of course — that the next billion are primarily from developing economies.
Three things stand out:
1. Healthcare. Internet connectivity can change the nature of patient care. Kaiser Permanente stands out for its use of virtual patient treatment. At the recent Dreamforce conference, Kaiser CEO Bernard Tyson said that 52% of patient interactions were handled virtually through smartphones, video conferencing, etc. Imagine the potential impact of giving virtual healthcare access to the next billion.
Traditionally there’s a limit to healthcare, the world has a limited number of health professionals. But AI has the potential to transform access to primary care, in particular. Baidu recently launched a health app which takes initial health history and narrows down the diagnosis for doctors. Over time, apps like this can augment any doctor’s ability to access the best new information in a cost effective, rapid way. As health AI gets smarter what could it treat on its own? Could an AI diagnose a skin problem from a photo and prescribe treatment? What about managing long term care for diseases such as diabetes with implants or over-the-air, in-situ drug delivery? Given AIs advantage is scale and speed, it promises to be a highly scalable way to provide benefits across large populations.
2. Education. Online courses have extended higher education from leading universities across the world. At The Next Billion conference, Coursera CEO Rick Levin talked about his company’s rapid growth in India and China. These opportunities should be available to the next billion people to come online as well. But how can AI extend these educational opportunities?
With advancements in conversational user interfaces, how much could an AI serve as a teacher’s assistant? And with improvements in higher cognitive functions, how much could an AI serve as an individual tutor? We think there is a significant opportunity for AI to extend individualized education to very large populations. In our upcoming report on the future of work we’ll show the capabilities that AI will be able to provide in the US workplace — and those capabilities overlap well with the needs of students around the world.
3. Resource management. Emerging economy resource requirements are significant. From energy to water to food, emerging economies need to increase productivity and efficiency to meet the increasing needs of their populations. AI systems have already shown promise in areas such as further increasing agricultural yields and improving the effectiveness of solar energy systems. Given the scale of data access and the ability to tap into the world’s best management algorithms, we can see how AI could provide a step up in resource management across the world.
The super-platforms (GAFA as Benedict Evans referred to them in his keynote presentation) have stated aspirations in enabling connection as part of extending their commercial goals. The challenge we lay down for these companies is to be more explicit and explanatory about how they see AIs role in raising the next billion.
