Member-only story
The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
The potential benefits of artificial intelligence are huge, but so are the dangers — Dave Waters
By Benjamin Musrie, Medical Researcher. Sydney, Australia.
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence by machines, specifically computer systems. These machines can mimic cognitive functions associated with the human brain such as learning, memory, problem-solving and decision-making. The field of AI was born at a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 where John McCarthy, an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist, coined the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Since then, many subsets of AI have been introduced with the aim of conferring computers with the ability to perform tasks regarded as strictly human.
Most of the AI that we hear about today — self driving cars, manufacturing robots, disease mapping — rely heavily on machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing.
Natural language processing is a branch of AI that bridges that gap between human communication and computer understanding. It allows the computer to extract meaning from human language and make decisions based on the information. Operating softwares such as Siri and Amazon Alexa are prime…
