Hearing aids and cochlear implants have been getting better for years, but a new type of device—eyeglasses that display real-time speech transcription on their lenses—are a game-changing breakthrough. Excerpt – free voice-to-text app on his [David Howorth, a person with multiple causes of hearing loss] phone, Google Live Transcribe & Notification. When someone speaks to him, he can read what they’re saying on the screen and respond as if he’d heard it. He belongs to a weekly lunch group with half a dozen men in their seventies and eighties, and when they get together he puts his phone in the … Read More
All posts in Artificial intelligence
The Luddites lost the fight to save their livelihoods. As the threat of artificial intelligence looms, can we do any better? Excerpt – The Luddites rejected the moral and political authority of a system that had abandoned long-held principles of fairness, quality, and mutual obligation. Under feudalism and mercantile capitalism, Britain’s rigid class structure placed the gentry at the top, merchants and professionals (such as doctors, parsons, and lawyers) in the middle, and the vast majority in the “lower orders.” Yet this social hierarchy was accompanied by labor-market regulations—both formal and informal—that provided some measure of reciprocity. Skilled trades were … Read More
MIT economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan says it is in humans’ power to put AI on a path to help us rather than replace us “[WSJ] What’s wrong with how AI tools are being developed and deployed? [Mullainathan] Every time Anthropic or OpenAI or Google releases a new model, you’ll notice they always talk about, oh, we did better on these benchmarks. That’s the way they keep score. In many ways those benchmarks dictate what these models are asked to be good at. We pick an area and then we say, “Can this thing do this as well as people?” So … Read More
“Primary care doctors now spend, on average, two hours a day filling out patients’ electronic health records. From 2009 to 2018, EHR length has increased by 60 percent. And yet most of this work is simply documentation, not problem-solving or reasoning. Why take doctors away from their patients or hire other teams of humans, like medical scribes, to transcribe and enter all this data, when AI can now do it instead? [..] they listen in on the conversation between a patient and physician, create a transcript, then organize the information from the transcript into the standard format doctors use, generating … Read More
“Akido Labs is using artificial intelligence to bring medical care to the streets of New York. The Los Angeles-based healthcare provider has created an AI doctor that suggests diagnoses and treatments based on patients’ symptoms and medical histories. A human doctor approves, modifies or rejects the recommendations. Now Akido is bringing this technology, ScopeAI, to ride-share drivers in New York through a partnership with two groups that can help it connect with these workers: the Independent Drivers Guild, an advocacy group, and Workers Benefit Fund, which works with labor unions and policy leaders to provide health and other benefits to … Read More
“My takeaway from my work with organizations as they grapple with artificial intelligence is that not only do most companies not need an AI strategy, but they shouldn’t have one at all. Going down that road will be, at best, a distraction. [..] Much of it comes down to data. Poor data quality—incomplete, biased or unstructured—affects AI performance in the same way it can have an impact on any other technology. If you don’t have good data, you can have great strategic intent, but you won’t be able to execute it. The strategy will simply divert attention from what the … Read More