Don’t Let Artificial Intelligence Get Under Your Skin

Our fears about the future often blind us to what technology is capable of doing in the present

Right now, you can do something magical if you own a smartphone

With a few taps of your thumb, you can download a little program called SkinVision that uses the camera to take a picture of moles or other blemishes on your skin. That image is automatically sent via a complicated relay system of cables and satellites to a data server in Europe. A machine, which has been trained on hundreds of thousands of pictures of melanomas over the last few years, analyses that image. It uses a piece of code, employing a clever statistical technique called deep learning, running off a whole bunch of custom-built integrated circuits that were originally designed for playing computer games.

Some people call this technological voodoo artificial intelligence, but that’s not really an accurate description. Those involved in casting the spells usually prefer to call it machine learning. It’s a new thing. The type of phone you use to take the picture has only been around for about 12 years, and the ability of our machines to see what’s in that picture is less than seven years old. Computers have been able to recognise text and…