The Week in Tech: A Break From Consumer Tech

The piece describes an A.I. research program whose accuracy matched or slightly surpassed human physicians in diagnosing common childhood diseases like influenza. The software was trained on the medical histories, lab tests and other clinical data in more than 600,000 electronic health records of children in southern China. It was an encouraging demonstration. But the experimental system relied on the easy access to personal data in China, where privacy regulations are less restrictive, and was confined to diagnosing common ailments. That step-by-step approach is the counsel for business in a new book by Thomas Davenport, "The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work" (MIT Press).