"I doubt medical technology will advance meaningfully for the median person." One way that I see meaningful medical change (which we probably have the technolo

"I doubt medical technology will advance meaningfully for the median person." One way that I see meaningful medical change (which we probably have the technology for right now) is in any kind of visual test (such as x-rays, CT scans, various types of blood tests) basically anywhere you have a highly paid human who uses their eyes to scan an image/microscope for a pattern that determines if you have some disease, fracture, something in your blood work is off, etc. At the moment, these test are time consuming (days minimum, often weeks or months) and very expensive because those highly paid humans can only scan so many samples in a lab every day. Once we turn computer vision algorithms onto the task (trained to spot visual clues for disease over thousands or millions of positive and negative samples, similar to how Google trained an AI neural net to recognise pictures of cats[1]), the time & costs of any type of visual medical scan will fall dramatically. Imagine getting the results of an x-ray back in seconds, with a result accurate to 99.99% certainty of a fracture. Of course, that main obstacle to widespread adoption of this type of technology will be political. Radiologists and other professionals won't take too kindly to being displaced. And of course then you will have AI technologies like Watson, which should allow doctors to get much more productive, so they get to see more patients in less time and reach a diagnosis with great accuracy than before. This will mean you need less doctors (lowering medical costs) but you get better outcomes. I think AI tech like Watson and computer vision will have a dramatic impact on medicine in the near future. [1] http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Unsupervised+SelfLearning+Neural+Network+Searches+For+Cat+Pics/article25025.htm http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Unsupervised+SelfLearning+N...