Ahead of his talk at EyeforPharma Barcelona next week, Medscape's Ben Greenberg talks to pharmaphorum about the hype surrounding technology, and offers ideas about how to identify meaningful innovation. You have an arresting title for your talk at the eyeforpharma conference: Artificial Irrelevance: Do physicians actually care about Healthcare's AI Revolution? Can you tell us about the premise behind that? The phrase'Artificial Irrelevance' is meant to evoke a few distinct concepts: The first is a reaction to media speculation that the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution is going to make doctors irrelevant and obsolete. Part of my talk will aim to illustrate the fallacy here, and that, just as mathematicians were not made obsolete by the invention of the calculator, neither will physicians be made irrelevant by the invention of analogous technology.

Science fiction luminary Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics mandated safety measures to limit artificial intelligence in robots, protecting humans from harm. That was 70 years ago. Largely written for fantasy books. Nowadays, researchers have developed artificial synapses, computers have won jeopardy and Google's computer can do something called supervised learning. With the robotics industry saying household robots will be the new PCs in ten years, the impact of robotic AI on humanity is no longer tomorrow's problem.