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AI Can Predict When Patients Will Die From Heart Failure 'With 80% Accuracy' (ibtimes.co.uk)
New submitter drunkdrone quotes a report from International Business Times: Scientists say they have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program that is capable of predicting when patients with a serious heart disorder will die with an 80% accuracy rate. Researchers from the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS) believe the software will allow doctors to better treat patients with pulmonary hypertension by determining how aggressive their treatment needs to be. The researchers' program assessed the outlook of 250 patients based on blood test results and MRI scans of their hearts. It then used the data to create a virtual 3D heart of each patient which, combined with the health records of "hundreds" of previous patients, allowed it to learn which characteristics indicated fatal heart failure within five years. The LMS scientists claim that the software was able to accurately predict patients who would still be alive after a year around 80% of the time. The computer was able to analyze patients "in seconds," promising to dramatically reduce the time it takes doctors to identify the most at-risk individuals and ensure they "give the right treatment to the right patients, at the right time." Dr Declan O'Regan, one the lead researchers from LMS, said: "This is the first time computers have interpreted heart scans to accurately predict how long patients will live. It could transform the way doctors treat heart patients. The researchers now hope to field-test the technology in hospitals in London in order to verify the data obtained from their trials, which have been published in the medical journal Radiology.
No. It's just a fucking program. All of these "AI" claims are just programs. AI doesn't exist. Just stop with the AI already, the word has lost all meaning.
I can remember when /. attracted some of the best informed and intelligent people you could find anywhere on the Internet. Now, all we have are members who inform us that we do not need computers, and their ability to find correlations in huge data sets. All we need is the intuition of smart people.
Look back at the early proposed tests for artificial intelligence. When supervised deep learning systems can use the immense processing capabilities of modern computers, to not only match, but to exceed the capabilities of humans in a wide range of problem spaces, it is appropriate to describe the result as "artificial intelligence". We do not mean literally that we have an intelligent bunch of integrated circuits and harddrives. But, the overall system can produce results that we would until recently have considered only achievable by human experts. Indeed, our AIs, in many situations, exceed the capabilities of the best human minds.
I am used to the idea of the general public feeling threatened by the capabilities of modern technology. I just wish sites supposedly intended for intelligent, scientifically-informed individuals could be exempted from such lack of reason.
This has always weirded me out as an argument. Intelligence is simply information processing in physical systems. What humans do when they make intelligent decisions is take in data from the environment and process it to make predictions. So when a doctor looks at the same data as the machine and makes a conclusion about treatment, he is making an intelligent decision, but when the machine does the same it's not intelligence it's 'just a program'? When a human being operates a motor vehicle and adapts his/her behavior to react to oncoming traffic he/she is using intelligence but when a machine does it it's 'just a program'? What?
This whole approach to me reeks to substance dualism; the human brain is a computer, a very advanced one at that, but it's just a computer. there is no 'soul' that somehow makes the human brain the only thing that's capable of intelligent operations. Right now brains are still able to cross-reference data better than computers, making humans as a whole more intelligent than computers but we're already at a point in which computer programs are able to take in data and adapt their behavior to meet a goal, whether it's driving a car or anything else, with better results than your standard humans, but somehow the platform that the program is being run on determines which of these 2 actions is categorized as 'intelligent'. This is nonsensical.
Intelligence is a scale, not a binary thing. The confusion about AI these days is people read 'AI' and they immediately equate that to either 'human level intelligence' and/or 'consciousness', neither of which are required for a system to be intelligent. A dog is more intelligent than a rat, a monkey is more intelligent than a dog, a human is more intelligent than a monkey and so far overall humans are also more intelligent than computers, but it doesn't mean that computers don't have a level of intelligence already, even though you cannot (yet) have a discussion/debate with the computer.
Imagine a few decades into the future wherein these systems are able to recognize speech so that a physician is able to consult with it during an operation. Or when they get to the point that the computers themselves are able to perform autonomous surgeries on people and react to complications on the fly. This is the direction we're headed to and getting there does not require the computers to become self-aware.
You can call it 'just a program' all you want, but using that definition the years of training and practice going on in the surgeon's head as he's trying to figure out the best way to cut the tumor out without causing a hemorrhage is also 'just a program'. The platform on which the program is being run may be wetware or hardware but it does not affect the intelligence of the program.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Funny thing - she didn't bother telling me what I might accomplish if I start eating right, or exercising more, or even if I quit smoking - in fact, she seemed rather dubious that it would have any real effect at all (except the smoking part, for which she was happy to suggest several types of help if I wanted it). She didn't even tell me what my odds would be if I did start spending money on these drugs. I'm sure that insurance will pick up almost all of the cost - and I'm also sure that some pharmaceutical company somewhere would make a fair chunk of change off me for the rest of my unnatural life, sort of an annuity for big pharma. Problem is, I couldn't be sure I'd always be able to afford the drugs, and I'm told "once you start, you can't stop".
Yeah. I think I'd rather die living my life than clutching for more days.
I read through the paper, but couldn't find any description of what the brain does which couldn't be considered information processing. It may not be digital processing, and it may not resemble how computers process instructions and retrieve data, but even if the physical architecture is different the brain still seems to be processing information.
He uses an example of a dollar bill, and how a person cannot recall every detail of a dollar bill from memory if asked to draw one. And that is somehow proof that the brain does not store data about the dollar bill? The person was still able to draw some details about the dollar bill, such as a person in the center and the numbers in the corners, so that data was stored somewhere. The author also makes a silly distinction between "storing data" and "changing the brain", as if the way the brain is changed isn't how it stores the data.
But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions.
Sounds a lot like the brain stored the song or poem somewhere in a way it could be retrieved later, under certain conditions. Just because the brain stores information in a less precise way as a computer doesn't mean it isn't storing anything. The rest of the article continues to make similarly odd claims without backing them up. The researcher takes some very valid arguments about how many researchers rely too heavily on computer / human brain metaphors, but then he makes a lot of wild statements himself without backing them up either.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke