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Bill Gates Talked With Google Employees About Using AI To Analyze Ultrasound Images of Unborn Children (cnbc.com)
Bill Gates said he talked to Google researchers about the application of artificial-intelligence technology in healthcare. "While Microsoft and Google are arch-competitors in many areas, including cloud computing and artificial intelligence research, the visit is an example of how Gates' broad interest in technology trumps Microsoft's historical rivalries with other tech companies," reports CNBC. From the report: Gates talked about the use of AI in weapons systems and autonomous vehicles before arriving at the subject of health care. "In the medical field, you know, we just don't have doctors. Most people are born and die in Africa without coming near to a doctor," said Gates, who is co-chair of the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which concerns itself with improving global health among other things. "We're doing a lot of work with analyzing ultrasound, and we can do things like sex-blind the output, because we're not having anybody actually see the image. We can tell you what's going on without revealing the gender, which is, of course -- when you do that, it drives gendercide. And yet, we're doing the analysis, the medical understanding, in a much deeper way, and that's an example where it's all done with a lot of machine learning."
"I was meeting with the guys at Google who are helping us with this this morning, and there's some incredible promise in that field, where, in the primary health-care system, the amount of sophistication to do diagnosis and understand, for example, "Is this a high-risk pregnancy?' 'Yes.' 'Let's escalate that person to go to the hospital level,' even though you couldn't afford to do that on a widespread basis. So this stuff is going to be very domain-specific."
"I was meeting with the guys at Google who are helping us with this this morning, and there's some incredible promise in that field, where, in the primary health-care system, the amount of sophistication to do diagnosis and understand, for example, "Is this a high-risk pregnancy?' 'Yes.' 'Let's escalate that person to go to the hospital level,' even though you couldn't afford to do that on a widespread basis. So this stuff is going to be very domain-specific."
Contrary to popular belief, the population growth rate in developed countries is nearly zero. Nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing countries, and Africa has the highest growth rate by far. So as well-intentioned as these humanitarian measures are (saving babies, food, medicine, clean water, etc), they actually exacerbate the suffering of these people. Medicine, clean water, and saving babies will cause their population to increase faster than it should be growing, forcing them to spread already-limited resources even thinner. Food aid puts local farmers out of business by depressing the market value of their crops, and discouraging others from taking up farming.
The correct way to help them is to help them develop their economies - improve their education systems (that's what the One Laptop per Child project was trying to do), help them build their civil infrastructure, keep criminals and militants in check, and promote private businesses. Then they can train their own doctors, build their own hospitals, grow their own food, pump their own clean water, and save their own babies. As barbaric as it sounds, right now the babies need to die at a high rate to keep their population growth in check. The high infant mortality rate there is symptom of their undeveloped economy. Treating the symptom with addressing the root cause just exacerbates the problem and their suffering.