How AI Is Taking the Scut Work Out of Health Care

When we think of breakthroughs in healthcare, we often conjure images of heroic interventions -- the first organ transplantation, robotic surgery, and so on. But in fact many of the greatest leaps in human health have come from far more prosaic interventions -- the safe disposal of human excrement through sewage and sanitation, for example, or handwashing during births and caesarians. We have a similar opportunity in medicine now with the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Glamorous projects to do everything from curing cancer to helping paralyzed patients walk through AI have generated enormous expectations. But the greatest opportunity for AI in the near term may come not from headline-grabbing moonshots but from putting computers and algorithms to work on the most mundane drudgery possible.