Open The Podbay Doors, HAL. Will Health Care Will Struggle To Adopt AI?

Remember in Space Odyssey, 2001, when HAL started to question Dave and the other crew members and ended up refusing to let him back on the spaceship? Well, in AI, we are possibly getting to this point where AI is making judgements which go against our reasoning. But, who is correct?

Health care innovation

Having been involved in healthcare research for more than two decades, there’s one thing I know … few sectors are more resistant to technological change than healthcare. In fact, there was a quote at one time that the magic number was seven in health care innovation, as that was the number of years that it took to show that a flagship wave of technological innovation in the NHS had failed and then be replaced with another flagship policy from the government.

The waste of money in Connecting for Health [here] showcased how resistant the NHS is to technological change. It ran from 2003 to 2015 and cost over £20bn — and with little in return. And, so, while we see successful pilots of AI in the NHS, one must wonder if they will ever properly see the light of day at scale in our world of health care.

This resistance is highlighted in a new paper by Agarwal et al. outlines an experiment in using AI within diagnoses [1]: