For Artificial Intelligence, the Future Is Now

Watershed technologies like AlphaGo make it easy to forget that artificial intelligence (AI) isn't just a futuristic dream. Sensing traffic lights, fraud detection, mobile bank deposits, and, of course, internet search -- each of these technologies involves AI of some kind. As we have grown used to AI in these instances, it has become part of the scenery -- we see it, but we no longer notice it. Expect that trend to continue: As AI grows increasingly ubiquitous, it'll become increasingly invisible. Major advancements in technologies dependent on AI -- like robotics, machine vision, natural-language processing, and machine learning -- will soon work their way into our daily lives. AI's integration into our world will transform employment, economic activity, and possibly the character of our society. Healthcare is ground zero for AI. In fact, AI has been quietly helping doctors treat diseases for almost its entire existence. In 1963, a Midwestern radiologist named Gwilym S. Lodwick published a paper in Radiology Society of America that described a technique he invented for predicting the survival span of lung cancer patients: Lodwick took X-rays and coded their features to represent tumor characteristics using numerical values. Then, as he explained, these numbers could "be manipulated and evaluated by the digital computer." Armed with (rudimentary) image processing, in the 1970s radiologists began using machine vision to generate data directly from images. These were the logic-based days of early AI, so algorithms followed a sequence of rules to identify body parts: If there's an oval here attached to a thick line, we're looking at a hip bone connected to a thigh bone. Lodwick called his technique "computer-aided diagnosis," and CAD has been an invisible tool of medicine ever since. By the 1980s and 1990s, doctors were using CAD to give them a second opinion for diagnosing everything from lumbar hernias to gastric pain.