Better medicine through machine learning: What's real, and what's artificial? Speaking of Medicine

Note: This Editorial is appearing in Speaking of Medicine ahead of print. The final version will appear in PLOS Medicine at the end of December. PLOS Medicine Machine Learning Special Issue Guest Editors Suchi Saria, Atul Butte, and Aziz Sheikh cut through the hyperbole with an accessible and accurate portrayal of the forefront of machine learning in clinical translation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a field emerged in the 1960s when practitioners across the engineering and cognitive sciences began to study how to develop computational technologies that, like people, can perform tasks such as sensing, learning, reasoning, and taking action. Early AI systems relied heavily on expert-derived rules for replicating how people would approach these tasks.