This article is a follow-up to my piece last week, Data Sets, Fraud, and the Future. Let's say a minor religion emerges in Ohio. Its basis is a story about a miraculous tree growing in an arid desert. The only problem is, if the members of this Church bothered to check, they would discover the exact place where the tree supposedly grew was no desert. Instead, it was an ocean.

Right off the bat, here is a scene from the near-future: AI takes a look at John Jones' medical records, does instant collating, and comes up with a disease diagnosis. Via Zoom, the doctor's AI assistant slaps on a diagnosis, and an hour later, two bottles of medical drugs arrive at Jones' door. One problem: the data set assembled by AI is preposterous. Jones' so-called symptoms don't add up to a disease. Only in another data set, held by the CDC, do the symptoms require a disease-label.

But hey, when your ad's copywriter is an artificial intelligence, you have to give it some credit for trying to connect with us weirdo organ-sack humans. Burger King's newest TV ad campaign claims each spot was "created by artificial intelligence," an explanation that precedes some truly bizarre voice-overs, such as, "Bed of lettuce for you to sleep on, bed of mayonnaise for extra sleep," and, "Burger King logo's chicken is the new potato." In a statement announcing the campaign--which will air during prime time on cable networks including MTV, History, TBS, Adult Swim and E!--the brand refers to as the creation of "a new deep learning algorithm that could give a glimpse into what the future of marketing and communications could look like." "AI, bots, machine learning, deep learning algorithms, blockchain, among others--these are all topical as we explore our future in marketing," says Marcelo Pascoa, Burger King's global head of brand marketing. "But we need to avoid getting lost in the sea of technology innovation and buzzwords and forget what really matters. Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for a great creative idea coming from a real person."

In a matter of decades, for example, they say one computer will have more capacity than all the human brains on the planet put together. Then, the prediction goes, AI will be virtually human, or more than human. However, just because AI has greater computational skills than any person or group of persons, where is the quality that makes it human? In order to answer that, you have to perform a little trick. You have to downgrade your assessment of humans.

Can I get a diagnosis? AI [artificial intelligence] is handling it now? You mean I just go online and see the results of my tests and read the diagnosis and pick up my drugs outside my front door? As AI creeps and crawls into the realm of medical diagnosis and treatment, and as it spreads under the banner of "more precise care for the patient," remember that AI embeds false data more firmly than any human doctor can. Once it's in there, how do you get rid of it?