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The Impact of AI on Surgery

The Impact of AI on Surgery

Telemedicine “We’ve witnessed ten years of change in a month” is a typical description of how the pandemic is accelerating the use of telemedicine. Before the virus, video appointments made up only 1% of the 350m consultations which Britain’s National Health Service handles each year. Companies like Docly, eConsult and AccuRx are changing that. The latter claims that 90% of primary care clinics in England are now using its video-calling system. The most dramatic form of telemedicine is remote surgery. It is not new, but it is growing, and it offers enormous benefits. It can help overcome the shortage of...
The Impact of AI on Healthcare

The Impact of AI on Healthcare

Opportunity knocks Healthcare is an obvious sector to deploy AI in. It generates tsunamis of data, vast amounts of money are spent on it, and there are plenty of opportunities to improve the quality of its products and services by making them more intelligent and intelligible. It is a mistake to think of healthcare as a single monolithic entity. Will Smart is the former CIO for the NHS in England, and he points out that healthcare carries out the activities of numerous different industries, including hotels, catering, research, professional services, janitorial services, logistics, manufacturing, and many others. What kinds of...
The Impact of AI on Workspaces

The Impact of AI on Workspaces

Big buildings move slowly It is a truth universally acknowledged that artificial intelligence will change everything. In the next few decades, the world will become intelligible, and in many ways, intelligent. But insiders suggest that the world of big office real estate will get there more slowly - at least in the world’s major cities. The real estate industry in London, New York, Hong Kong and other world cities moves in cycles of 10 or 15 years. This is the period of the lease. After a tense renewal negotiation, and perhaps a big row, landlord and tenant are generally happy...
The Impact of AI on Journalism

The Impact of AI on Journalism

Automated writing Back in 2014, the Los Angeles Times published a report about an earthquake three minutes after it happened. This feat was possible because a staffer had developed a bot (a software robot) called Quakebot to write automated articles based on data generated by the US Geological Survey. Today, AIs write hundreds of thousands of the articles that are published by mainstream media outlets every week. At first, most of the Natural Language Generation (NLG) tools producing these articles were provided by software companies like Narrative Science. Today, many media organisations have developed in-house versions. The BBC has Juicer,...
Book review: “The Price Of Tomorrow” by Jeff Booth

Book review: “The Price Of Tomorrow” by Jeff Booth

Two big themes Jeff Booth is a successful Canadian entrepreneur. His book “The Price of Tomorrow” is a warning about two dangerous trends which he thinks are not receiving enough attention. The first is that technology and price deflation will cause lasting widespread unemployment. The second is that the global economy is underpinned by an unstable mountain of debt. These are obviously serious concerns, and at least on technological unemployment I think he is largely correct – particularly with regard to his proposed solution. Successful entrepreneur In 1999, Booth co-founded BuildDirect, a technology company designed to simplify the building industry....
The Impact Of AI On Call Centres

The Impact Of AI On Call Centres

The pandemic and business continuity planning The pandemic is a severe stress test for the business continuity plans of global corporations. The operators of call centres are playing an important role in meeting that challenge, and it has not been easy. In normal times, if an earthquake hits Bangalore, you can switch capacity to your call centre in Manila. But what do you do when all the call centres around the world that serve your customers are hit – all at the same time? The big outsourcing call centre companies which serve corporate giants have hundreds of thousands of employees,...
The Impact of AI on Influencer Marketing

The Impact of AI on Influencer Marketing

Digital marketers have to deploy AI. They also have to defeat it In October 2017, Facebook altered the Instagram API to make it harder for users to search its giant database of photos. The change was a small element of the company’s response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it was a significant problem for parts of the digital marketing industry. Not long before, New York-based influencer marketing agency Amra & Elma had developed a platform that ingested data from Instagram, and allowed its client to use AI image classifiers to find very specific influencers. For instance, they could find...
Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism

Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism

The substitutive effect In the future, machines will replace humans in jobs. This is not controversial: it’s what machines have done since well before the start of the industrial revolution. Petrol pump attendants were replaced by automated pumps, secretaries were replaced by Microsoft Office. This is what economists call the substitutive effect of automation: humans are substituted in jobs by machines. The complementary effect From time to time, fears have been expressed that humans would run out of jobs entirely. I first wrote about this concern back in 1980, and like many other people at the time, I under-estimated the...
The Impact of AI on Professional Services

The Impact of AI on Professional Services

Accountants and lawyers to use AI to cannibalise their business – before someone else does When you hear the word “automation...”, does your mind skip straight to “…destroys jobs”? If so, there should be a few stops in between. Automation is about removing friction, driving down costs, speeding processes up, and generally improving efficiency. Making goods and services better and cheaper is a good thing: it makes us all richer. There is scope to do this in all walks of life, and not least in professional services, such as accountancy and the law. Much of the work done by the...
Free: Review copies of “Pandora’s Oracle”

Free: Review copies of “Pandora’s Oracle”

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a novel called Pandora’s Brain. I’ve just finished the sequel, Pandora’s Oracle, and review copies are available – free, gratis, and for nothing. Let me know if you would like a copy – PDF, or a MOBI file for your Kindle. Pandora’s Brain was published in 2014. I wrote the first draft of a sequel the following year, but I wasn't happy with it, so it sat alone inside a computer, un-read and un-loved. I went on to write a series of non-fiction books about AI. I decided...
Book review: “How Innovation Works” by Matt Ridley

Book review: “How Innovation Works” by Matt Ridley

How Innovation Works A Review of “How Innovation Works” by Matt Ridley Innovation, according to Matt Ridley, “is the reason most people today live lives of prosperity and wisdom compared with their ancestors”. If this is true, then we should obviously all be keen to learn how to generate more of it. Matt Ridley is one the best non-fiction writers of his generation. He could be described as England’s Yuval Harari – minus the messianic vegetarianism, and the obsessions with religion and meditation. His latest book is a pleasure to read: he carries his considerable learning with an engagingly light...
Ten lasting impacts of the virus

Ten lasting impacts of the virus

We’re all wondering how to survive the virus: how to stay alive, and also solvent. Assuming we manage that, what will be its lasting impacts? 1. Appreciation of exponentials The rising death tolls in many countries has been shocking to watch. Many people are getting their first up-close-and-personal view of the astonishing power of exponential growth. We have seen it for decades in the dramatic growth of computing power described by Moore’s Law, but like the mythical boiling frog in the saucepan (it really is a myth: frogs are not that daft), we acclimatise to improvements on that timescale, and...
Book review: “A World Without Work” by Daniel Susskind

Book review: “A World Without Work” by Daniel Susskind

Technological unemployment and economists The term “technological unemployment” was popularised in the 1930s by the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes. Fifty years later, another renowned economist called Wassily Leontief warned that jobs for humans might follow the same path that jobs for horses did in the early 20th century. So the idea has a respectable economic heritage, but economists are still arguing about whether it will actually happen. The latest contribution comes from Daniel Susskind, a member of an unreasonably talented family of lawyers, economists and academics. His economic credentials are strong: previously an adviser at Number 10, he is...
Change has never been this fast. It will never be this slow again

Change has never been this fast. It will never be this slow again

The 2010s were an ironic decade. Most metrics show that human welfare improved at an extraordinary rate, but many of us seem to be fearful or resentful, or both. The world is far richer in 2020 than it was in 2010, and global inequality is declining. There is still plenty of poverty, egregious inequality, and injustice, and there are still brutal wars and civil unrest. But overall, life expectancy is sharply up, and child mortality and deaths during childbirth are sharply down. Despite global warming, the number of deaths and injuries from climate-related disasters has fallen significantly, and many rich...
Review: "The Age of AI" presented by Robert Downey Jr

Review: "The Age of AI" presented by Robert Downey Jr

A YouTube series, presented by Robert Downey Jr Robert Downey Jr is best known as Tony Stark, the character behind Iron Man in the Avengers movies. It is said that Downey Jr modelled his portrayal of Stark on Elon Musk, the creator of Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the most outspoken commentators about artificial intelligence. Musk famously said that by developing advanced AI we are “summoning the demon”, and that we must work hard and fast to ensure it remains safe. In fact he thinks we must develop the technology to link our minds intimately with AI systems, so...
Review of “More from Less” by Andrew McAfee

Review of “More from Less” by Andrew McAfee

The New Optimists Andrew McAfee wants to cheer you up. If you read his latest book with an open mind, he might well succeed. McAfee, an MIT economist, is joining the New Optimists (Bill Gates, Stephen Pinker, Hans Rosling and others) in trying to persuade us that the world is not going to the dogs. The central claim of “More From Less” is that capitalism and technological progress are allowing us “to tread more lightly on the earth instead of stripping it bare.” Unfortunately, he admits, this good news is hard for many people to believe because catastrophism has such...
Book review: "The AI Economy" by Roger Bootle

Book review: "The AI Economy" by Roger Bootle

Roger Bootle is not afraid to think and say unconventional things. He is that rare phenomenon: a professional economist who thinks that Brexit is a Good Idea. Indeed, he belongs to a group called Economists for Brexit, now renamed as Economists for Free Trade, which argues for a no-deal Brexit. Whatever you think of that, the economics consultancy that Bootle founded, Capital Economics, has been very successful financially, and in 2012 it was awarded the £250,000 Wolfson Economics Prize, the second most valuable economics prize in the world after the Nobel, for a proposal that EU member states who wanted...

Surveillance capitalism and anti-capitalism

In the last few years, the computer scientists and entrepreneurs who fuel Silicon Valley have gone through a bewildering series of transformations. Once upon a time they were ostracised nerds. Then they were the lovable geeks of the Big Bang Theory TV show, and for a short while they were superheroes. (In case you’re wondering, geeks wonder what sex in zero gravity is like; nerds wonder what sex is like.) Then it all went wrong, and now they are the tech bros; the anti-heroes in the dystopian saga of society’s descent into algorithmic rule by Big Brother, soon to be...