Robo-Dermatologist Diagnoses Skin Cancer With Expert Accuracy

There's been a lot of hand-wringing about artificial intelligence and robots taking away jobs--by one recent estimate, AI could replace up to six percent of jobs in the U.S. by 2021. While most of those will be in customer service and transportation, a recent study suggests that at least one job requiring highly skilled labor could also be getting some help from AI: dermatologist. Susan Scutti at CNN reports that researchers at Stanford used a deep learning algorithm developed by Google to diagnose skin cancer. The team taught the algorithm to sort images and recognize patterns by feeding it images of everyday objects over the course of a week. "We taught it with cats and dogs and tables and chairs and all sorts of normal everyday objects," Andre Esteva, lead author on the article published this week in the journal Nature, tells Scutti. "We used a massive data set of well over a million images."