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An area where AI can make a major impact is improving the efficiency of human experts in the developing world and underprivileged communities even in developed

An area where AI can make a major impact is improving the efficiency of human experts in the developing world and underprivileged communities even in developed nations. There is a huge lack of doctors, nurses, architects, etc in many of those areas. In some countries, a doctor may need to see 100+ patients a day as a matter of course. We can imagine how the quality of care suffers as a result. As examples, AI, including NLP and computer vision technologies, can complement doctors and nurses by: - performing initial querying of symptoms, - regular pre-screening for diseases at minimal costs (thus reducing costs that incur with delayed diagnosis and treatment), - automatic checking for medicine side effects or, in future, recommend suitable medicine for particular patients given diagnosis and test results, - etc If deployed properly, the technologies will improve care, reduce healthcare worker’s overload, and enable greater access from rural/poor areas. The same applies to several other expertise that is not lacking in well-off regions.

baybal2 7y ago
> An area where AI can make a major impact is improving the efficiency of human experts in the developing world and underprivileged communities even in developed nations. Few people seem to notice that "computer revolution" has largely been taking jobs from white collars way more than blue collars: Lawyers: Google.com devastated the paralegal profession, and seem to be now taking on more "retail" law services. Marketing: Marketings is the biggest IT services spender in a lot of companies now, but the amount of people involved is less and less with each year. Marketing execs seem to be first C-level people to feel pressured by the computer industry. Operations and strategy that previously were a job for 100K a year man now being taken on by marketing interns for 30k Operations and admin staff: very clearly, email, Google Calendar and MS Word has allowed people to do more fancy documents, and organisational work without aid of professional typists, and secretaries Project management professionals: no explanations needed, MS Project, no matter how badly it is normally used, have made PM work available to less trained staff without formal PM training Finance: the entire class of "retail fund management" shops are now being driven out of business simply by banks with better GUI apps. The entire need for them was previously dictated by having somebody on the phone who was ready to do all financial formalities for the millionaire class. Investment: same as above, cheaper brokerages with online GUIs have displaced a lion share of brokers. Even well moneyed M&A people now often see 30 something junior partners taking their work with use of Google and ctrl-F
- nopinsight 7y ago
  The issue of job displacement is complex and I concur that it is a real problem for many people whose careers are in jeopardy because of technological disruption. They should be provided retraining and/or other kinds of assistance. What I discussed above is about the domains and geographical areas where the expertise is lacking resulting in human suffering or underdevelopment and the situation either improves too slowly or worsens (due to population aging, for example). In domains where complex expertise is required, people will not be replaced unless some kind of human-level AI is invented (when it happens, at least some years/decades away, the ramifications will be vast and outside the scope of this post). Doctors, nurses, architects, etc perform diverse, often creative tasks—many of which no current AI is even at an amateur level.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    > In domains where complex expertise is required, people will not be replaced unless some kind of human-level AI is invented. Expertise is an "inferior good" economics wise. Sadly, but a pretty much a fact for me. You don't need "superhuman AI" for this. When a business gets a lot of money to throw on people, the preference will go to more easily available cadres, even if net cost employing them will be higher. See, how IT outsourcing went. By far, computer programming is the hardest of intellectual professions, yet people with money are more fine ability to hire legions of come and by people in South Asia, than one man with a worth of 100 back home. You will also be surprised that this is also the case in such "intellectual" industries as management consulting, finance, and fund management. Thirty something MBAs doing googling, ctrl-Fing, and some times using purpose made analytical software is what makes most of workforce in "big and serious" investment groups.
    - nopinsight 7y ago
      If the business employs underqualified expertise (esp at a higher cost) for an important function, it will suffer and lose to competition over time (unless it’s a monopoly). A local streaming company tries to compete with Netflix and its app is not up to par on latency and reliability. Soon people catch on, cancel subscriptions in drove, and tell others in public forums.
solidasparagus 7y ago
I've been hearing that technology is going to transform healthcare in the developing world for the past two decades. While all of those things you mention help, they aren't the big problems - logistics, finances, corruption, stigma around being diagnosed with diseases, low density of clinics, low education. These technologies will only help if you have trained healthcare workers, equipped with the medicine they need and a population that is willing and able to come into clinics.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nopinsight 7y ago
  AI-assisted telemedicine along with (non-doctor) healthcare workers who regularly visit homes can help mitigate some of the problems you describe. Healthcare workers can be almost an order of magnitude cheaper than doctors and take much less time to train. In a middle-income country I know very well, there is no lack of such workers, but doctor shortage, esp specialists, is acute in many rural areas.
  - 131012 7y ago
    The main problem with healthcare access is money. Unless you create the socialist-bot-of-ai-love, tech won't fix this issue.
    - nopinsight 7y ago
      AI and telemedicine can help lower costs by improving the efficiency of some logistics and the most expensive kinds of expertise.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - solidasparagus 7y ago
    > "healthcare workers who regularly visit homes" This is unrealistic in the developing countries (low income) I am familiar with. The density of clinics is so low that clinics need to cover vast geographic areas. Clinical workers are easier to train, but still in extremely short supply in most rural areas of the developing nations I know well.
legulere 7y ago
There are far larger foundational problems in the healthcare system that prevent further digitalization. None of the points you name strikes me as a good use case for modern machine learning techniques: - Siri and co can hardly understand everyday things. Using NLP for symptoms seems like a massive downgrade from speaking with a human. - how does machine learning play a role in pre-screening? Pre-screening can also increase costs because you find a lot of harmless things as well - I hope you will Put out a product telling if something is safe or not using machine learning. There are already systems out there and they are much more akin to experts systems which makes much more sense. The only area where I see a big impact is medical imaging where you can already see great research going on.
- nopinsight 7y ago
  Yes, I agree that current technologies in deployment are insufficient for many of the things described, especially language understanding. A few of my previous posts this year expressed skepticism of current tech in detail. I work in NLP/NLU and foresee some of future advances that will enable them. Moreover, BERT et al models that were just invented over the last 1-2 years may already allow the implementation of basic versions of these human language technologies. In many domains, they are on-par with humans in answering multiple-choice/span selection questions. See, for example: https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard http://www.qizhexie.com/data/RACE_leaderboard.html http://www.qizhexie.com/data/RACE_leaderboard.html I also agree that technologies are not silver bullets. They are enablers/accelerators of improvement in process and efficiency that can increase human well-being.

baybal2 7y ago

> An area where AI can make a major impact is improving the efficiency of human experts in the developing world and underprivileged communities even in developed nations. Few people seem to notice that "computer revolution" has largely been taking jobs from white collars way more than blue collars: Lawyers: Google.com devastated the paralegal profession, and seem to be now taking on more "retail" law services. Marketing: Marketings is the biggest IT services spender in a lot of companies now, but the amount of people involved is less and less with each year. Marketing execs seem to be first C-level people to feel pressured by the computer industry. Operations and strategy that previously were a job for 100K a year man now being taken on by marketing interns for 30k Operations and admin staff: very clearly, email, Google Calendar and MS Word has allowed people to do more fancy documents, and organisational work without aid of professional typists, and secretaries Project management professionals: no explanations needed, MS Project, no matter how badly it is normally used, have made PM work available to less trained staff without formal PM training Finance: the entire class of "retail fund management" shops are now being driven out of business simply by banks with better GUI apps. The entire need for them was previously dictated by having somebody on the phone who was ready to do all financial formalities for the millionaire class. Investment: same as above, cheaper brokerages with online GUIs have displaced a lion share of brokers. Even well moneyed M&A people now often see 30 something junior partners taking their work with use of Google and ctrl-F

nopinsight 7y ago
The issue of job displacement is complex and I concur that it is a real problem for many people whose careers are in jeopardy because of technological disruption. They should be provided retraining and/or other kinds of assistance. What I discussed above is about the domains and geographical areas where the expertise is lacking resulting in human suffering or underdevelopment and the situation either improves too slowly or worsens (due to population aging, for example). In domains where complex expertise is required, people will not be replaced unless some kind of human-level AI is invented (when it happens, at least some years/decades away, the ramifications will be vast and outside the scope of this post). Doctors, nurses, architects, etc perform diverse, often creative tasks—many of which no current AI is even at an amateur level.
- baybal2 7y ago
  > In domains where complex expertise is required, people will not be replaced unless some kind of human-level AI is invented. Expertise is an "inferior good" economics wise. Sadly, but a pretty much a fact for me. You don't need "superhuman AI" for this. When a business gets a lot of money to throw on people, the preference will go to more easily available cadres, even if net cost employing them will be higher. See, how IT outsourcing went. By far, computer programming is the hardest of intellectual professions, yet people with money are more fine ability to hire legions of come and by people in South Asia, than one man with a worth of 100 back home. You will also be surprised that this is also the case in such "intellectual" industries as management consulting, finance, and fund management. Thirty something MBAs doing googling, ctrl-Fing, and some times using purpose made analytical software is what makes most of workforce in "big and serious" investment groups.
  - nopinsight 7y ago
    If the business employs underqualified expertise (esp at a higher cost) for an important function, it will suffer and lose to competition over time (unless it’s a monopoly). A local streaming company tries to compete with Netflix and its app is not up to par on latency and reliability. Soon people catch on, cancel subscriptions in drove, and tell others in public forums.

solidasparagus 7y ago

I've been hearing that technology is going to transform healthcare in the developing world for the past two decades. While all of those things you mention help, they aren't the big problems - logistics, finances, corruption, stigma around being diagnosed with diseases, low density of clinics, low education. These technologies will only help if you have trained healthcare workers, equipped with the medicine they need and a population that is willing and able to come into clinics.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nopinsight 7y ago
AI-assisted telemedicine along with (non-doctor) healthcare workers who regularly visit homes can help mitigate some of the problems you describe. Healthcare workers can be almost an order of magnitude cheaper than doctors and take much less time to train. In a middle-income country I know very well, there is no lack of such workers, but doctor shortage, esp specialists, is acute in many rural areas.
- 131012 7y ago
  The main problem with healthcare access is money. Unless you create the socialist-bot-of-ai-love, tech won't fix this issue.
  - nopinsight 7y ago
    AI and telemedicine can help lower costs by improving the efficiency of some logistics and the most expensive kinds of expertise.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  > "healthcare workers who regularly visit homes" This is unrealistic in the developing countries (low income) I am familiar with. The density of clinics is so low that clinics need to cover vast geographic areas. Clinical workers are easier to train, but still in extremely short supply in most rural areas of the developing nations I know well.

legulere 7y ago

There are far larger foundational problems in the healthcare system that prevent further digitalization. None of the points you name strikes me as a good use case for modern machine learning techniques: - Siri and co can hardly understand everyday things. Using NLP for symptoms seems like a massive downgrade from speaking with a human. - how does machine learning play a role in pre-screening? Pre-screening can also increase costs because you find a lot of harmless things as well - I hope you will Put out a product telling if something is safe or not using machine learning. There are already systems out there and they are much more akin to experts systems which makes much more sense. The only area where I see a big impact is medical imaging where you can already see great research going on.

nopinsight 7y ago
Yes, I agree that current technologies in deployment are insufficient for many of the things described, especially language understanding. A few of my previous posts this year expressed skepticism of current tech in detail. I work in NLP/NLU and foresee some of future advances that will enable them. Moreover, BERT et al models that were just invented over the last 1-2 years may already allow the implementation of basic versions of these human language technologies. In many domains, they are on-par with humans in answering multiple-choice/span selection questions. See, for example: https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard http://www.qizhexie.com/data/RACE_leaderboard.html http://www.qizhexie.com/data/RACE_leaderboard.html I also agree that technologies are not silver bullets. They are enablers/accelerators of improvement in process and efficiency that can increase human well-being.