Artificial intelligence is mastering a wider variety of jobs than ever before Science News

In 2018, artificial intelligence took on new tasks, with these smarty-pants algorithms acing everything from disease diagnosis to crater counting. In April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration permitted marketing of the first artificial intelligence that diagnoses health problems at primary care clinics without specialist supervision (SN: 3/31/18, p. 15). The program, which inspects eye images for signs of diabetes-related vision loss, could be a boon for people in remote or low-resource areas where ophthalmologists are scarce. Other eye-inspecting AI programs are learning to recognize everything from age-related vision loss to heart problems. One artificial intelligence is a celestial cartographer after Galileo's own heart.