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Introduction to artificial intelligence in medicine

2024; Medknow; Volume: 65; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4103/singaporemedj.smj-2024-060

2737-5935

Joseph J.�Y. Sung,

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a 'hot' topic that features across mass media, social media and conferences worldwide. It penetrates and influences every aspect of our life. We are using AI whenever we ask Siri a question. Siri is a speech recognition tool that converts our spoken words into a natural language question, which in turn converts it into a prompt question looking for an answer. When we are in the driver's seat of a Tesla, the car can drive itself autonomously along the highway to the programmed destination with no action required by the driver. The self-driven car uses a host of AI algorithms that sense the road and environment, plan a course of actions and drive the car to the assigned destination. In hospitals and clinics, the image-based AI algorithms in computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and endoscopy help to identify the lesion in the body and give detailed descriptions of its pathology, size, shape and nature — details that are beyond the human eyes of experts. Artificial intelligence is the electricity of the 21st century and, I believe, many years after. It is an essential and largely unseen component of everyday life — in homes, cars, shops and workplaces. It brings data and decisions to almost everything we do. If we have a power failure, the world will quickly grind to a halt. If AI is down, our smartphones, traffic, banks and even the healthcare system may crash. Artificial intelligence will soon become an indispensable and mostly invisible component of our lives. That is why we need to know how to live and work with AI. One of the challenges of any new technology is the unexpected consequences that follow it. Neil Postman said that we tend to "gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future". In a 1998 speech titled "Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Changes", Postman summarised the issues that should concern us today about AI. He warned that "technology giveth and technology taketh away". For every advantage a new technology brings, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The advantage may well be worth the cost, but the disadvantage may also exceed in importance the advantage. Postman also pointed out that every new technology benefits some and harms others. Technological changes, especially those with disruptive advancements, are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible. History provides us with plenty of examples of the unintended consequences of new technologies. When Thomas Savery patented the first steam-powered pump in 1698, nobody was worried about global warming. Steam engines powered the Industrial Revolution, which ultimately lifted millions of people out of poverty, but the resulting climate change is happening much faster than anticipated. In 1969, when the first Boeing 747 took to the air, the age of affordable air travel began. With the huge increase in international travel today, we have seen an unprecedented speed in the spread of infectious diseases, threatening the health of billions. The severe acute respiratory syndrome and coronavirus disease 2019 are just the beginning. The goal of publishing this series of articles, a collection of talks and speeches presented at the first International Conference on AI in Medicine held in August 2023 at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, is to open our eyes to this disruptive technology, with a focus on its application in medicine. This is just the beginning of AI in medicine. We have not yet seen the retreat of water before the big waves, but we must be prepared for it. The implementation of AI in medicine has been relatively slow, and rightly so, because we are dealing with life-and-death situations. But the tsunami is coming. Till now, we have not built moral machines that have the ability to capture human values and be held accountable for their decisions. There are many reasons why I hope they will never be capable of that. Machines should not be our moral compass. Only humans can be held accountable for human decisions. If we cannot build moral machines, then we should limit the decisions handed over to machines and restrain their power. Furthermore, we should also speed up our ethical and social considerations of AI in medicine. If we build a nuclear power plant or a space shuttle, we want it to be 100% safe and worthy of our trust. Similarly, if we use AI in healthcare, we want it to be (or close to) 100% accurate, auditable, explainable, robust, fair and trustworthy. We want a machine that we can trust. We should then train ourselves to be a co-pilot with the machine so that we do not lose our autonomy. Let us put our effort together to achieve this goal.