Thursday, September 3, 2015

New Focus, Same Me...












 Newcomb Hollow Beach, Cape Cod National Seashore, Wellfleet, MA, 9 August 2015, 11:03, © David Hartzband


I have not posted to this blog in about nine months. I’ve been busy working on a large analytics project in the healthcare safety net (Federally Qualified Community Health Centers) & writing on technology topics other than in healthcare.

The next posts will be a mixture of thoughts & predictions mainly in the area still called artificial intelligence. I’ve a good deal of work in this area in the (far distant) past, but my focus has always been on developing systems to enhance the reasoning & problem solving abilities of people. This is different than the focus of many of my colleagues who have attempted to develop systems that reproduce some aspect of human capability, up to & including developing systems that are indistinguishable from people, not just in the linguistic sense of a Turing test, an “imitation game”, but in a holistic sense. I have no opinion about the integrity & usefulness of this work, other than that I have chosen to emphasize other aspects of machine abilities in my own work, but the recent spate of very visible & knowledgeable scientists & technologists who have commented on the direction of current AI work[1] gives some idea of how concerned people are.

My next few posts will focus on this general topic with an emphasis on the evolution of search, the implications of ultra-large data set analytics (Big Data) & deep learning for the development of AI as well as the implications of these technologies for healthcare information technology & healthcare in general. My next planned posts should be (remember, planning is for guidance):
·      Turing Tests, Search & the development of Artificial Intelligence – A Meditation on the Movie Ex Machina
·      The Concept of Data as an Asset & Its Relationship to Healthcare Decision Making
·      Design Process & the Evolution of Knowledge Work – What Will Future Knowledge Worker Really be Like? & What Kinds of Systems Will They Use?
·      & further out… General Thoughts on the Evolution of Information Technology based on a “Cluster of Terms” Model[2]

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