How AI is Evolving the Fight Against Cancer

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been hailed to be the next saviour of the NHS, with new robotic overlords saving thousands of lives from cancer-related deaths over the next 15 years. AI has suddenly become panacea, solving everything from self-driving cars to detecting fake news - but what changed so fast? On one hand, not much: most of the hype that people are selling as "AI" was only a few years ago termed "machine learning", a change in part due to a previous desire to distance humans from something that was indistinguishable from one. On the other hand, a few specific advancements have aligned, computational power has increased and data is being generated at an unfathomable rate, with more created in the 2017 than in the history of mankind. In other words, it isn't the ideas or the technologies that are new, but rather the opportunities.