In addition to responding to all kinds of questions and generating never-before-seen images, artificial intelligence has significant applications for medicine. The magazine Nature published a study in which AI improves on human results in evaluating echocardiogram images, used to diagnose cardiac problems. The authors, a multidisciplinary team at Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, did a randomized blind study --the first of its kind with this technology-- to evaluate the AI's precision analyzing 3,495 echocardiogram images that show the heart's functioning. In the study, cardiologists were asked to assess evaluations that either technicians or AI software made of the ultrasound images. The doctors corrected mistakes in 16.8% of AI evaluations, compared to 27.2% of human ones. Additionally, the cardiologists could not tell which evaluations were done by AI and which by humans.

In the world of science fiction, robots given artificial intelligence often play a menacing role capable of killing human beings either on their own volition or at the behest of their programmers. Think movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Blade Runner" or even "I, Robot," for instance. However, even with all of the recent advances leading to an increasing daily reliance on artificial intelligence, the prospect of technology running the show and outpacing humans may still be a long ways off, a Google executive said this week. "There is a lot that machine learning doesn't do that humans can do really, really well," Diane Greene, Google's senior vice president of cloud businesses operations, said Tuesday at the Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco. "Nobody expected some of the advances we are seeing as quickly as we're seeing them but, the singularity, I don't see it in my sentient lifetime."

In the world of science fiction, robots given artificial intelligence often play a menacing role capable of killing human beings either on their own volition or at the behest of their programmers. Think movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Blade Runner" or even "I, Robot," for instance. However, even with all of the recent advances leading to an increasing daily reliance on artificial intelligence, the prospect of technology running the show and outpacing humans may still be a long ways off, a Google executive said this week. "There is a lot that machine learning doesn't do that humans can do really, really well," Diane Greene, Google's senior vice president of cloud businesses operations, said Tuesday at the Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco. "Nobody expected some of the advances we are seeing as quickly as we're seeing them but, the singularity, I don't see it in my sentient lifetime."