AI 101 for dentists, clinicians, and payers

AI has been part of our imaginations and simmering in research labs since a handful of computer scientists rallied around the term at a Research Workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956 and birthed the field of AI. Back in 1956, the dream of AI pioneers such as John McCarthy was to construct complex machines that possessed characteristics of human intelligence. However, general AI machines that replicate human senses, human reasoning, and think as we do are still mostly constrained to Hollywood and science fiction novels. AI today is, however, able to perform specific, comparably narrow tasks as well as, or sometimes better than, we humans can. Examples of narrow AI include applications such as classification of pathology from X-ray imagery, identification of people in Facebook photos via facial recognition, or your spam filters in Gmail.