AI -- The Quiet Revolution

There will be a lot of people who will click on this article, look at the title and think I live under a rock. AI seems to be everywhere in the news lately, from the massive data crunchers employed by Facebook and Google to find out what cereal you're eating to the scary facial recognition systems that could transform the way we think about crime prevention (for better or worse). There's so much attention on the big flashy developments that no focus is being made on the projects that are actually making a big, tangible difference in people's lives now. I'm reminded of a Vox article I read a year ago. It was about a Twitter user who made an account titled: 'on Mice,' and sought to debunk every sensational healthcare development by pointing out that the authors of the clickbait news were omitting a major feature of their revolutionary new procedure or medicine: that they weren't actually tested on humans, they were tested on mice.