AI MAKES MARBLE STATUES DANCE !!!
AMAZING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Making two marble statues dance, with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Awesome. Bringing statues alive with an old favourite song in the background. Where are we heading with technology 🤔 !!! The video must be seen to believe it.
Click on the video link on the last page to see the statues dancing.
The known knows, and known unknowns !
Twenty years ago, an amazing dance on the screen would have grabbed superlatives of admiration. Internet was authentic and people just believed. Cut to 2024, such a dance instantaneously gets the comment ‘Oh, AI-generated’. The fake is replacing real, really fast. Great tool, it is known that the AI is making lives more efficient, comfortable and profitable. But there are many unknowns some of which are known. AI is being received with both admiration and alarm – impact on jobs, privacy violation and even automation of weapons. All tech introductions had glitches. Did not Google Photos appallingly labelled a pic of two black people as “gorillas” !!! Recently, the Google’s new “Gemini AI” had identified Google’s own famous founders as “East Asian” ! Did not the AI engine portray Modi as a “fascist” ! How are the courts going to handle defamation cases against the “AI” ? Do the judges also seek prompting by the AI for writing judgments on these cases !!!
“Internet is a collective hallucination -- one of the best humanity has ever generated.” -- Jonathan Zittrain
“The speed, efficacy, versatility and utility of the ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ in medicine has already made it an integral part of medicine. The world of medicine is now riding on the crest of the unknown territory of ‘AI and Machine Learning’. We can’t do without AI just as we can’t live a ‘normal’ life without cell-phones.”
-- Dr. T. Rama Prasad, ‘PAY WHAT YOU CAN’ Clinic, Perundurai, India
.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE in MEDICINE.
RAMA PRASAD T.
Dr. T. Rama Prasad,
Formerly: Medical Superintendent (Special) of RTS & IRT Perundurai Medical College and Research Centre,
Perundurai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Presently: Director of ‘PAY WHAT YOU CAN’ Clinic, Perundurai, Erode District, TN – 638052. drtramaprasad@gmail.com WhatsApp +91 98427 20393 BLOG https://drtramaprasad.blogspot.com
WEBSITE www.rama-scribbles.in Twitter @DrRamaprasadt Facebook T Rama Prasad
Telegram Dr T Rama Prasad
` A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF MEDICINE AND SURGERYSN
Vol. 121 No. 01 January 2024 ISSN 0003 5998
Indexed in IndMED Email: admin@theantiseptic.in www.theantiseptic.in
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
Dr. T. Rama Prasad
Dr. T. Rama Prasad is the WORLD RECORD holder of authoring 28 articles related to COVID-19 in 30 months, published in a medical journal (The Antiseptic – www.theantiseptic.in -- Indexed in IndMED), and reporting in the same journal the WORLD’s FIRST CASE of ‘Yellow Nail Syndrome’ associated with COVID-19, PT & DM (https://drtramaprasad.blogspot.com/2017/04/yellow-nail syndrome_28.html ). Interestingly, he reported the first case of YNS from India in an American medical journal long ago in 1980. He wrote his first article in the premier journal, The Antiseptic, four decades ago. Many of his articles written over half-a-century may be accessed at https://drtramaprasad.blogspot.com/2017/04/dr-t-rama-prasad.html & https://drtramaprasad.blogspot.com/2017/04/my-in-newspapers_28.html & https://drtramaprasad.blogspot.com . He is the former MEDICAL SUPERINTENDENT (Special) of R.T. Sanatorium & Perundurai Medical College and Research Centre.
KINDNESS and EMPATHY COST NOTHING
Scientific integrity is crucial to promote both trust in science and trustworthy science.
The integrity manifests only by refraining from hype and by being transparent about conflicts of interest. “Ethics in medical practice is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.” Good science and kind practice are the twin towers for medical progress. Tentativeness is the hallmark of science and one must adopt what the philosopher of science Lee McIntyre calls a scientific attitude – an openness to seeking new evidence and a willingness to change one’s mind. All the same, we have to keep in mind the following quote:
“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
-- Richard P. Feynman
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE in MEDICINE .
RAMA PRASAD T
Dr. T. Rama Prasad,
Formerly: Medical Superintendent (Special) of RTS & IRT Perundurai Medical College and Research Centre,
Perundurai, Tamil Nadu.
Presently: Director of ‘PAY WHAT YOU CAN’ Clinic, Perundurai, Erode District, TN – 638052.
Specially Contributed to “The Antiseptic”
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“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”
-- Jean Baudrillard
Key words: Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, Chatbots, Robots
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INTRODUCTION
In a lighter vein, ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ may be defined as a digital tool to which ‘Human Intelligence (HI)’ is surrendered ! HI has experience, wisdom, a sense of proportion, presence of mind and a human touch. But it is absolutely impossible for it to go through the humongous data on the Net quickly and come to conclusions. On the other hand, AI has an exceptional capacity to analyse from numerous large research databases of millions of pages in a jiffy and provide a picture. But it can be brittle with built-in biases, and sometimes not relevant to the ground realities. It doesn’t have the human sense – for example, a Belgian man died by suicide after an AI chatbot in a “curbside consult” allegedly “encouraged” him to sacrifice himself to control climate change ! (June 2023; N Engl J Med 2023; 388 : 2397-2399). And, it may be scary to go alone in a Jaguar 1-PACE driverless car or get a gall-bladder removed by a robot.
AI in medicine is advancing at an amazingly fast pace and gaining immense importance as can be evidenced by the fact that the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) announced launching of a new journal for ‘Artificial Intelligence in medicine’ exclusively, “NEJM AI” , in 2024 (ai.nejm.org), and aims to familiarise primary care physician with the subject.
The intelligence of human brain is being questioned now after numerous developments followed the sensational ‘ChatGPT’. This is a new era in which algorithms generate art, music, science and philosophy, pushing us to wonder as to what the creative prowess of AI is going to do in medicine. Pitfalls aside, there is much promise.
This semi-formal article may give a broad overview of AI in medicine as it is today, and aims to familiarise primary care physician with the subject to some extent. This is relatively a new subject about which we know a lot, yet we don’t know how to go about it and declare that ‘old is not gold’ !
The term ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ is used to denote a simulation of human intelligent behaviour, critical thinking and application of mind by using computers and technology. The term was first coined by Mc Carthy in 1956 for the science and engineering of making ‘intelligent machines’.
INNOVATION
The emergence of immense interest in the application of AI in medicine arose out of the incredible development of myriad applications in our daily life like Apple’s siri, Google’s Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexawhich are AI-based virtual ‘assistants’. The Star Wars character C-3PO is a crude version of these ‘assistants’ which drive the work through AI and ‘machine learning’.
The scope for the AI-driven application in medicine is very wide, ranging from capturing the dictation of medical notes to synthesizing patient interviews and laboratory test results; health insurance coverage to analysing and interpreting databases and clinical scenarios. Though these are not a panacea, the AI-based systems may often give results faster and better than human beings. However, they may work in a narrow domain without the application of mind. Hence, it’s imperative that we apply our mind before giving a green signal to their conclusions. And, the public may be cautioned about ‘Chatbots’ which may provide incorrect advice on some medical matters.
EVOLUTION
One of the founders of modern computers and AI was Alan Turing (1950) after whose name a test was named (‘Turing Test’) which evaluated the ‘intelligent behaviour’ of a computer in achieving ‘human level’ performance in cognition related tasks.1 The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was first coined in 1956 during the ‘Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence’.
Half-a-century ago, computers were slow and large like huge refrigerators of 250 kg weight. Around 1965, a ‘primitive medical chatbot’ called ELIZA was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at the artificial Intelligence laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1980, the first hard-drive IBM 3380 of more than 1 GB capacity was introduced. Later, it graduated to such a level that “IBM’s Deep Blue” could beat the chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov !
Nevertheless, the ‘rule-based’ systems didn’t work well in clinical medicine, though they were very successful in commercial applications. During 1980s and 1990s, AI techniques such as ‘Fuzzy Expert Systems’, ‘Bayesian Networks’, ‘Artificial Neural Networks’, and ‘Hybrid Intelligent Systems’ were developed in different clinical settings in health care. Later, technology had developed to incorporate ‘Deep Learning Models’, ‘Dynamic Data’, and ‘Human Interaction Systems’ to evolve AI and ‘Machine Learning’, and ‘Chatbots’. A ‘Chatbot’ is a computer program that uses AI and ‘Natural Language Processing’ to comprehend and analyse the matter related to questions that are put forth, simulating human conversation.
By November 2022, ‘Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT)’, a language model trained by ‘OpenAI’ was introduced publicly (
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt ) . These AI-driven machines gave the hope of a new way of interaction with medical professionals with actionable insights into human behaviour. The ‘Chatbots’ hold the promise of being an assistant and a teacher as well, albeit with some key caveats announced by the developers.
Now in 2023, ‘Language Models’ with hundreds of billions of parameters and an almost infinite data on the Internet are available to generate new text and applications. Already there are a myriad ‘Chatbots’ catering to a range of needs from customer service to personal virtual assistance.
THE LATEST – “KRUTRIM”, the Indian ChatGPT
On December 15, 2023, in what is touted as India’s answer to ChatGPT, ‘Ola’ firm unveiled the country’s first multi-lingual AI model called “KRUTRIM” (a Sanskrit word meaning ‘artificial’). This is unique and more advanced than ChatGPT in the sense that it can understand as many as 22 Indian languages. In technical terms, ‘Krutrim’ is a ‘family of large language models (LLM)’, trained on over two trillion ‘tokens’. There seems to be a great scope for ‘Krutrim’ in ‘AI of medicine’ in the multi-lingual India.
PUBLIC AWARENESS
Public awareness of AI in medicine is crucial, especially of the negative aspects of ‘Chatbots’. Medicine is much different from other fields where AI is employed. ‘Chatbots’ don’t apply ‘live mind’, and hence their suggestions may lead to wrong health decisions which may be detrimental. If a ‘Chatbot’ is asked a medical question on a “Curbside Consult,” the correctness of the answer may be harder to determine, even for a health provider. A layperson would fall a prey to it. The greatest concern is that of the public using the medical suggestions projected by ‘Chatbots’, as people have trouble differentiating medical fact from fiction. Proofreading a note by the AI / ‘Chatbot’ may be within the range of a health provider but not within the comprehension of a layperson.
Fortunately in India, people were not much exposed to ‘Medical AI’, not even to ‘General AI’, at least until November 2023 when the ‘Altman’s episode’ erupted and caused public prominence of the technology. The massive reverberations in the AI circles and media during this episode made people aware of the potential of AI development : ‘the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
THE ALTMAN EPISODE
Sam Altman, 38, AI wizard and co-founder cum CEO of OpenAI, was fired by the management board on November 17, 2023. A few days later, on November 20, 2023, the gigantic ‘Microsoft’ company hinted that it would welcome Altman to start a new AI establishment in its fold. In another few days, Altman virtually sacked the management board of the OpenAI, with the support of hundreds of the employees of the OpenAI. The sensational news was all over the media. Sam did it with his ‘Natural Intelligence’. Of course, he would not have used AI to do this ironical twist of a Hollywood blockbuster.
‘the GOOD, the BAD and the UGLY’
People didn’t know much about AI until when news hit headlines in November 2023 about a turmoil in ‘OpenAI’ which is the most influential company in the fledgling AI industry. Now they know that OpenAI had developed the popular chatbot ‘Chat GPT’ which can instantaneously and effortlessly write a clinical case presentation, a CV, even a PhD thesis on any subject, a diagnosis, or a plan of treatment, supposedly better than a human being. That’s good news. In course of time, people may become more dependent on medical ‘Chatbots’ and ‘Curbside Consult’ than medical professionals which may lead to wrong diagnosis and detrimental treatment. That’s bad news. AI may be used in wars, using ‘germ-warfare’. The overindulgence in AI by Israel might have been skilfully exploited by Hamas which bombarded it by rockets. This may just be the tip of the iceberg of a ‘cognitive warfare’ and an Armageddon of sorts. This is ugly news.
AN ANECDOTE
A bulla in a lung was detected and I am called upon to give an opinion. I promptly referred the case to a thoracic surgery unit. “The bulla in the lung is to be resected immediately to prevent fatal complications,” said one thoracic surgeon. Another surgeon said “The surgery may lead to nasty complications; after all, it may be an innocuous bulla.” I was left to wonder as to whether ‘Artificial Intelligence in Medicine’ could give an unequivocal opinion.
The GOOD
The ‘AI in Medicine’ has already become a useful tool in almost all the branches of medical science and art -- interpretation of images of radiographs, histopathology and optic fundi; capturing the dictation of medical notes; synthesizing patient interviews and laboratory test results without clinical intervention; processing matters connected with health insurance; analysing and interpreting large research databases for research studies. Lots of incredibly good applications of ‘Medical AI’ are already in vogue on the skills landscape. One recent application is about managing diabetes through continuous glucose monitoring devices which helps in adjusting immediately the dose of insulin and the type of diet. And, of course, AI can drive our ambulances to the right hospital in an emergency without a driver. The breadth of potential AI applications is so wide that virtually no field in medicine is not already being serviced by AI. All these novel facilities enhance efficiency and render insights that can’t be attained by traditional data-analysis methods.
“Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence, it’s a tool to amplify human creativity and ingenuity.”
ADVANTAGES
The general AI applications in medicine are plenty like ‘Online scheduling of appointments’, ‘Online check-ins in medical centres’, ‘Digitalization of medical records’, ‘Reminder calls for follow-up’, ‘Immunization reminders’, ‘Drug dosage algorithms, ‘Adverse effect warnings’, etc. They are used in various fields like ‘Drug development’, ‘Disease diagnostics’, ‘Health plans analysis’, ‘Health monitoring’, ‘Digital consultation’, ‘Surgical treatment’, ‘Managing medical data’, ‘Personalized treatment’, ‘Medical treatment’, etc.
Among the specific AI applications in medicine, radiology has been the most upfront and welcoming speciality.2 AI in radiology not only labels abnormalities but also identifies quickly the negative features in computed tomograms, X-rays and magnetic resonance images.2
In 1986, a decision support system (DXplain) based on symptom complex was developed by the University of Massachusetts which indicates probable differentials in diagnosis to aid educating medical students.3 A system was developed by the name ‘Germwatcher’ at the University of Washington to detect and investigate hospital-acquired infections.4 ‘Babylon’ is a model which the patients can use to consult a doctor on-line for getting advice, monitoring their health and ordering test kits. A programme, CBTpsych.com, developed at the University of Sydney can be used to give AI therapy to patients with mental disorders.5
The Da Vinci robotic surgical system’s robotic arms enable surgeons to do precision surgery.6 The ‘AiCureApp’ of the National Institute of Health of the USA monitors the use of medications through a smartphone webcam.7 Monitoring physical activity, alertness levels, sleep quality, cardiac activity, etc. had become easy with the advent of ‘Fitbit’, ‘Apple’, etc. AI is used in The Netherlands to detect mistakes in treatment, workflow inefficiencies, etc.
Apart from these applications, Stanford University made a ‘Program AI-assisted Care (PAC)’ to care for the geriatric patients, patients in ICUs, and to ensure perfect hand hygiene to prevent hospital-acquired infections.8,9,10 Analysis is done by ‘Healthcare’ conversational projects as to how ‘Siri’, ‘Google Now’, ‘S Voice’, and ‘Cortana’ respond to mental health issues, interpersonal violence, and physical health questions from ‘mobile-phone-using’ patients. A virtual nurse, ‘Molly’ was developed to provide follow-up care to patients discharged from hospitals.
These AI applications in medicine reduce manual labour to a great extent and provides enormous extra time for physicians to spend with the patients. They also enhance productivity, precision and efficiency.
Developing new pharmaceutical agents by traditional methods takes years and cost a gazillion dollars. With the advent of AI, the time and expenditure could be enormously reduced.
It was documented that AI systems could diagnose skin lesions and identify pulmonary tuberculosis lesions radiographically, better than dermatologists and pulmonologists, as the systems had “seen” more cases than these experts could have seen in a lifetime ! 11,12
DISADVANTAGES
When computers were introduced in banks in the late 1980s, they were met with resistance over fear of job losses. In the same way, now with the application of AI in medicine, doctors and some paramedical staff are worried about less job opportunities. And, there is a concern, as machines can’t have certain human traits such as critical thinking, interpersonal communication skills, emotional intelligence, creativity, human touch and personalized attention which are essential in clinical medicine. A voice is heard from a robot, shrieking : “Machines need not have service-minded human traits as the traits left humans long ago in search of Hippocrates who said ‘don’t make money in the sick room’ !!! ; one advantage with us, robots, is that we can’t be trained to acquire the human trait of feeling the PURSE instead of the PULSE of the patients.”
The AI in medicine is not always dependable. In the ‘Digital Mammography DREAM Chalenge’ study, it was found disappointingly that the ‘area under receiver operator curve’ was just 0.87 which is roughly approximated to only the bottom 10% of the radiologists.13 It can’t totally replace physicians and surgeons who have to apply their mind in every case and situation.
AI can document medical project reports, dissertations for university degrees, or research papers better than ordinary human beings. As such, the AI, especially the ChatGPT, may stunt scholarly abilities of medical-research-students and make them lose the capacity to do original research. The explosive growth of ChatGPT had paved the way for fraudulent research publications related to medicine.
The AI comes in handy to alter radiological and pathological images to create convincingly publishable fake images. Such a misconduct in medical research made the Stanford University investigate its president, Marc Tessier-Lavin who may also be an insufficiently attentive senior author like the Harvard cardiologist Eugene Braunwald. Prominent journals published 157 Covid-related papers between January 2020 and October 2021 which were retracted. AI-assisted fake medical research may do more harm than fake medicines. Will the AI nourish or deplete creativity ? It all depends on how one makes the use of it, like any modern device. When judgements on important matters are done by the AI, humans may lose the ability to make appropriate decisions. I hasten to say : “Let it do the routine work, and It would be highly profitable to use these AI systems intelligently and properly rather than restricting the usage.”
“ABERRANT INTELLIGENCE (AbIn)”
I am coining this expression: ‘Aberrant Intelligence (‘AbIn’)’. With the advent of digital communication and AI, regrettably, the human traits of inter-personal communication, critical thinking, human touch, virtue of good human behaviour and values are being less used both in medicine and in day to day life. Machine is replacing man. And, aberrant intelligence (AbIn) is prevailing over the man.
The lively inter-disciplinary human discussions among medical professionals are giving way to machine conversations which are paradoxically delaying proper and practically oriented treatment. Theory is prevailing. For reasons of convenience, ‘aberrantly intelligent’ people are not caring much for the human traits mentioned above, and are looking for instant solutions on medical ‘Chatbots’ and ‘Curbside Consult’ for their medical problems. This had led to inappropriate diagnosis and wrong treatment in many cases. The ‘tricks and tools’ of ‘AbIn’ had spilled over to medical research -- the episode of the infamous articles that were published and retracted in famous journals like The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine using allegedly fraudulent and fabricated data generated by the ‘Surgisphere’ through ‘AI in medicine’ is an example.
For more on this, read my article published in The Antiseptic of September 2022, titled ‘COVID medical literature -- the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ .14 The writing under the title “HCQ, IVERMECTIN, CORONAVIRUS and RESEARCH FRAUDS” in the link below may also be of interest (https://drtramaprasad.blogspot.com/2017/04/hydroxychloroquine-hcq-and-coronavirus_29.html ).
The involved ones in this malpractice are very ‘aberrantly intelligent’ doctors in the USA. The ‘AbIn’ is obviously present in the cases related to Marc Tessier-Lavin of Stanford University and Eugene Braunwald, a cardiologist at a Harvard institution. Prominent journals published 157 Covid-related papers, mostly assisted by ‘AI in medicine’, between January 2020 and October 2021 which were retracted. The stupidity in using such ‘Aberrant Intelligence’ in academics made the otherwise brilliant medical specialists ignominious.
The ‘AbIn’ is present among common people too. I exemplify this with what really happened recently -- one daughter-in-law sent a text message to her father-in-law over WhatsApp requiring him to submit over WhatsApp bills of all the purchases he makes, including the ones of the value of even one rupee, without saying a word about the issue in person though they live under the same roof. The shocked old man wondered how to get a bill for the peanuts he purchases on Marina Beach for one rupee ! While COVID pandemic mandated “Social Distancing”, the “AbIn” is now creating “Human Distancing” which may grow to colossal dimensions to engulf humanity.
There are equal number of skeptics and proponents for AI-augmented practice.
AI in GENERAL
Whatever happens in ‘General AI’ affects and impacts ‘AI in Medicine’. The concerns about the bad are identical. On the safety front, experts in ‘AI in medicine’ are equally worried. As it’s a nascent field, regulations can’t easily be framed. It’s difficult even to judge the goodness or badness in certain areas of AI in medicine. The ambiguity is more or less the same in the general context or the medical context. The recent summit of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) in December 2023 declared a commitment for “responsible stewardship of trustworthy, responsible, sustainable and human-centred use of AI.” The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) may facilitate production of ‘deep-fake’ videos and execution of high-tech heists and bank scams. It may kill patients through wrong clinical decisions. It has the capacity to keep the human brain on the backseat and annihilate the Homo sapiens in many ways. Could the AI be the FRANKENSTEIN’s MONSTER ?
“Make sure that we don’t do something foolish. With artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the DEVIL.” -- Elon Musk
The Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud said at the 36th ‘LAWASIA’ conference on November 25, 2023: “There is a complex interplay between AI and personhood, where we find ourselves navigating unchartered territories that demand both philosophical reflection and practical considerations.” He cited that a “human-robot” called Sophia was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia.
This year’s (November 29 to December 1, 2023) Bengaluru Tech Summit, Asia’s largest tech event, featured various emerging technologies including Machine Learning, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Spacetech, Animation, Deepfake Technology, and Conversational AI. It is exactly a year since OpenAIlaunched ChatGPT which is just the beginning of language models which may be available on cell-phones in near future. The CEO of Gnani.ai, a ‘voice-first conversational AI’ company said : “Gen AI and other advancements are going to be building blocks of metaverse. Customer experience is going to change and we will be interacting with brands through voice, text and other natural channels.”
The Summit had discussed various subjects like AI-generated synthetic audio, video content, fake content risks, Faceapp, , video portraits, cyber security, 5G adoption, 6G, future wireless technologies, integration of AI and Internet of Things, advancements in automotive manufacturing, advances in avionics & defense, effluent air treatment solutions, apps to prevent fraudulent transactions, fabric & footwear tools, animations & comics, deep tech-based platforms for quality assessments, and AI in medicine.
CAUTION
Every development in modern medicine offers opportunities and throws challenges too. AI in medicine can be dichotomized into ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ components. The ‘virtual’ part deals with a wide range of documentation from electronic health record systems to neural network-based systems. Doctors are to be wary of the recording systems, as the data which are not alterable may at a later date be used as evidence in a litigation. Such litigations made some doctors drawn into legal quagmires. They are going around offices and courts leaving their practice. The ‘physical’ part relates to robots in surgery, ‘intelligent’ prosthesis, elderly care, etc. One should be cautious about the legal issues in this fledgling surgical field.
THE WAY FORWARD
The speed, efficacy, versatility and utility of the AI in medicine has already made it an integral part of medicine. The world of medicine is now riding on the crest of the unknown territory of ‘AI and Machine Learning’. We can’t do without AI just as we can’t live a ‘normal’ life without cell-phones. It’s important to train new generation of medical and para-medical people on matters related to the fledgling AI machines and, more importantly, on soft skills of treating patients as human beings, not as programmed devices.
On this count of human behaviour, most of the people would like to go to the good old ‘Family Doctor’(who is extinct) rather than the machine-driven corporate hospitals. Complete replacement of humans in medical practice would spell the end of the ’noble profession’. The ideal aim should be to strike a fine balance between the usage of ‘AI in medicine’ and the ‘personalised human attention’. Ultimately, it’s the human psyche that matters. A machine can never differentiate the ‘artificial smile’ of a receptionist from the ‘natural smile’ of a rural granny !
The progress, pitfalls, promise, and promulgation at the interface of AI and medicine is so fast-moving that we would remiss not to address the beneficial potential and the possible hazards as well. The tools are new to us, and we shall be learning how to use them, but learn we must. We have to learn on the go. By taking over the dreary documentation work, the tools provide us extra time to spend with the patients that makes medicine the rewarding profession we all value.
If the ‘TIME MACHINE’ allows us to travel to the future, the following would be the scenario : You are greeted with a plastic smile and the robot with a humanoid appearance converses with you in any language of your preference. She makes you comfortably seated and records all ‘relevant’ data and vitals. Then a paramedic robot draws blood with a painless laser gun. A myriad of other robots does all the tests and send you to a ‘real’ doctor on a ‘virtual screen’. When advised robotic surgery, robots take you into the theatre and bring you back into the ‘recovery room’ after implanting an ‘electronic blood vessel’ or an ‘electronic brain chip’with ‘brain and computer interface’ to cure amnesia. There is no presence of kith and kin before or after the surgery, as it’s not a social or cultural norm these days. The ‘wired generation’ has the humans eliminated !
Yes, it’s a crisis. But the crisis gives us an opportunity to focus and enhance what only humans can do about -- invention, creativity, original thinking, compassionate behaviour, emotional intelligence, interpersonal communication, personalized attention, empathy, sympathy, human touch, etc. After the crisis of World War II, while working to form the United Nations, Winston Churchill said:
“NEVER LET A GOOD CRISIS GO TO WASTE.”
.-- Winston Churchill
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE in medicine.
An uncharted journey.
-- Dr. T. Rama Prasad
PESSIMISM
“Artificial Intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.” -- Nick Bostrom
“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” -- Stephen Hawking
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.” -- Alan Turing
“Make sure that we don’t do something foolish. With artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the DEVIL.” -- Elon Musk
Notwithstanding the PESSIMISM, the AI tool ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, and the integration of AI tools has begun in India. The first AI school has come up at Thiruvananthapuram in India on August 25, 2023. “Life2vec” is an AI tool trained on data from the entire population of Denmark which is reported to be capable of predicting one’s health to lifespan ! Astrologers, you would also lose jobs ! PESSIMISM ?
Dr. T. Rama Prasad
LEGAL CONUNDRUM
Even the judges are not sure as to what judgement is to be delivered on the legal issues connected with ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’, as it’s a new field with unforeseen ramifications. Media, authors, artists and even some coders have started to sue creators of ‘original content’ by using ‘generative AI’. ‘Authors Guild’ in America and the New York Times went to court against ‘OpenAI’, the creator of ‘ChatGPT’. For copyright violation, the American media outlet filed a case in the Manhattan federal district court.
Traditional AI models used limited data for pattern recognition for general utility and are mostly predictive in nature. The recent versions of AI such as ‘ChatGPT’, termed as ‘Generative AI’, create content at a higher ‘intelligent’ level, using material of others without permission or compensation. The content is created, perhaps, more intelligently than a human brain – give it a topic, it writes a wonderful essay instantaneously, going through billions of pages. One may be bewildered to know that the size of data required to create a ‘ChatGPT’ is a gigantic 45 terabytes, or about one million feet of bookshelf space ! So much of the material that is used belongs originally to others. So, the logic is that the AI has to pay the original writers or contributors. The ‘Venture Capitalists’ of the AI field argue that any mandatory payment would curb the development of further technology. The law is not clear in this arena, more so in India where ‘chatbots’ are in the making for multiple Indian languages. It is largely an untested legal area.
T. Rama Prasad
Lawmakers in the UK alleged in January 2024 that false matches by the technology (Live Facial Recognition – LFR used at the British Grandpix & at King Charles III’s coronation), which is yet to be debated in parliament, have led to more than 65 wrongful interventions by the police.
AI’s potential to create JOBLESSNESS & FAKE IDENTITIES
A latest report (2024) by Accenture says that the General AI has the potential to impact 44% of all working hours across industries, enable productivity enhancements across 900 different types of jobs, and create $ 6-8 trillion in global economic value. The exponential innovation and technology (from eye-tracking to machine learning to brain-computer interface) is making AI to facilitate human-like reasoning, creativity, and responding. Spatial computing, metaverse, digital twins and AR/VR technologies may make humans unnecessary in many areas where we work, live and learn. This may also mean losing the present type of jobs.
The capabilities of AI are such that there is a growing menace of fake identities (deepfakes) and altered reality. The Generative AI and its blending with deepfake technology impacting voice, image, and video-alike has opened a landscape filled with advantages and risks. Side by side, AI fabrication detection solutions are developing such as : Remote Photoplethismography, Digital Watermarking, biometric analysis, etc. Mc Afee unveiled an advanced deepfake audio detector tech, named ‘Project Mockingbird’ at theConsumer Electronics Show 2024 in Las Vegas which leverages contextual, behavioural and categorical detection models to help in the early detection of fabricated AI-generated audios.
A recent (2024) “State of Work” report by Slack indicates that AI and automation would free up Indian desk workers with 75% to boost productivity (by 53%), saving about five hours per week. Jobs of a set of skills like ‘drafting, laying-out and specifying, monitoring or scheduling’ may be highly impacted while jobs related to ‘establishing and maintaining relationships, resolving conflicts or coaching, and developing personal relationships’ may not be affected much. In course of time, continued learning and upskilling by AI would ultimately power more people in jobs of different nature instead of replacing them. Creativity would no longer be only about brainstorming or toiling in solitude. Instead AI would be used to generate many new possibilities to be tested and established. AI is gaining traction in India with industries using the technology for predictive analytics, customised learning paths, and real-time feedback to meet the dynamic needs of the modern business systems.
AI PHONE
Samsung incorporated numerous AI features in its latest flagship models, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, Galaxy S24+, and Galaxy 24, on January 17, 2024. The Galaxy S24 Ultra, the12GB 1TB Titanium Gray model, is priced at Rs. 1,59,999. It has ‘intelligent text and live call translation’ features, offering seamless communication to the users. It can translate messages in real-time in 13 languages. The ‘Live Translate’ offers two-way real-time voice and text translations of phone calls within the native app, even without cellular data or Wi-Fi. The AI phone has many other features: live conversations translated on a split-screen view; while driving in a car, it summarises incoming texts and suggests relevant replies and actions; transcribes, summarises, and even translate recordings; erasing, recomposing, and remastering images; suggests perfectly suitable tweaks for each photo; Generative Edit can fill in parts of an image background with generative AI; and more, and many more. And many more companies are introducing such models.
D2M Technology
There are about 400 million people in India who have access to devices but cannot pay for the Internet. D2M delivers video content to a phone without using the Internet, just like having I-Fi offload. Similarly, one can offload broadcast content.
Ads coming up on AI-driven surgeries
Go to : https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/why-has-the-government-issued-an-ai-advisory-explained/article67933240.ece
The big fat FLIP-FlOPPING
FINALLY, it looks that our BRAIN has some role to play in our lives !!! Read the article below.
AMAZING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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and enjoy the “intelligent artificial” dance by the statues, created by ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE !!!
