How Engineer AI Is Transforming Healthcare (And Why We're Not Ready For It)

Artificial Intelligence surpasses mere buzzword status, and rises to a level of universality. Humans have managed to engineer AI that can achieve a vast array of possibilities. From the field of robotics, to cybersecurity – professionals engineer AI to be used in various systems, for a better, more effortless functionality. Artificial intelligence has been used to alleviate cumbersome activities, which have been traditionally done through low skilled labour. One of the most rapid growth, is within the field of healthcare – especially now, as the globe is experiencing a crunch in manpower because of the coronavirus (Covid-19) epidemic.

Engineering AI For Pandemic Response

Within the field of AI, we have been able to engineer better machines, expediting the field towards advancement in the process. By 2030, the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will have permeated every industry currently in existence. Healthcare is the most obvious example in this regard. Scientists have been able to engineer AI algorithms, which have accomplished everything from creating medicines (like antibiotics), to performing human-assisted surgeries.

Putting the existing threat of the coronavirus into picture, Artificial Intelligence has achieved in a span of three months, what humans couldn’t in a generation. Rapid scanning of patients, especially who harbour contagious pathogens, can be safely tackled with Robot Doctors (as they have come to be known). Scientists have managed to engineer AI paramedics that can provide a descriptive analysis of the patient’s physiology in no time.

These AI are not limited to scanning, they can also proficient in creating potent medicines – ones which a team of humans can spend up to 10 years in research for. Scientists are banking on engineering AI that will bring about the cure for Covid-19, embarrassingly faster, than it would take a human to do.
All in all, having a remote robot deal with a patient during an outbreak such as the coronavirus of 2020, is much more feasible (not to mention safer), than for a human being performing the same functions.

Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure

For all the leaps forward we have taken to engineer AI doctors, the reluctance to implement these systems supersedes any viable implementation it might possess. A lot of the countries affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic just don’t have the monetary fortitude to support such a leap in technological infrastructure.

Every penny that went into the provision of a Covid-19 testing kit could’ve easily gone to fund an AI-based pandemic response squad. Nearly 11,000 people have succumbed to this horrid disease, but it’s not too late yet. Nation-states can lend their coin to Engineer AI bots, in a joint cloud based race to find the cure that mankind so desperately seeks. The answer might be beyond humans, but is it beyond a machine? If we never try, we’ll never know.