Captain America, Spider-Man and Iron-Man.
All fictional superheroes, but now we will start to live in a world with a real-life superhero, that
goes under the name of artificial intelligence.
AI can save lives. If you assign a life saving task to a neural network, it will excel. Maybe not the
first time, but eventually, when it gets the taste of this, you can not take it away, it will succeed, it
will flourish and it will triumph. And AI, will be our new, real life superhero.
I think AI should be cheered. Because it enable us to better save lives. It can identify diseases
and determine the best medicine, it can protect a lot of wildlife species, and it can even predict
natural disasters. Imagine mortality rates and poacher crime rates all over the world will drop by
more than 50%, what an eutopia we would live in.
Today, I will discus multiple ways that neural networks are able to save lives. Artificial
Intelligence already makes it happen today, Imagine how this will develop in the multiple years
to come.
An AI algorithm designed by a seismologist of the Texas university has predicted earth quakes
in China over a 7 month period with a 70% success rate. The neural network successfully
predicted a total of 14 earth quakes, it missed one and it gave eight false warnings. This might
not sound impressive, but hear this. Professional seismologists can not predict earthquakes
themselves. This gives them a 0% success rate. Imagine saving over 230,000 people with a
computer program, which were the people that died during the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka.
230,000 people… it’s also the amount of annual deaths caused by human errors in the health
sector in the United States. I believe that the assistance of artificial intelligence can be of major
importance in the future. Imaging comparing 20 million oncology studies to a patients’ raw data
in just 600 seconds. It is what Watson, the neural network supervised by IMB did in Japan in
2015. A Japanese female diagnosed with Leukaemia would not recover after chemo therapy.
The doctors collected all the data from the patient and inserted into the Neural network. The
neural network diagnosed the patient with a very rare form of leukaemia and she survived.
This shows one of the many possibilities how artificial intelligence could save lives in health
care.
Human lives are, however, not the only lives that can be saved by ai. In Zambia, poachers who
kill, for example, elephants in order to sell their ivory tusks. They often come undetected
pretending to be fisherman. However, a neural network has made the poacher’s life way more
difficult. The neural network is connected to multiple thermal cameras, when they notice
something unusual they can alert the ranger teams. This saves lives, time, and is way more
efficient.
1.3 million, that is the annual amount of human deaths annually as the result of road accidents.
Imagine this number can be reduced to 0 in the next ten years. Waymo, the autonomous car of
google with over 32 million km of real road experience has not been in one lethal accident.
Imagine all cars on the road are autonomous and are constantly communicating which direction
they are going to go in. We would live in a world were being on the road is the safest place ever.
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