Google and Microsoft, rivals in cloud computing, have turned their attention to healthcare as they look to win over hospital systems as customers. Google has struck long-running partnerships with insurer Highmark, where it plans to build tools to help patients to share health information between visits, and Mayo Clinic, where it is tasked with developing a suite of AI solutions. Microsoft, in the meantime, made one of its largest acquisitions to date, with its $19.7 billion purchase of clinical documentation company Nuance. At MedCity INVEST Digital Health, leaders from both companies talked about their interoperability efforts and the future of AI in healthcare. Both rivals agreed on one thing: that these solutions should serve as a support, not a replacement, for clinicians.

Artificial intelligence could lead to an Orwellian future if laws to protect the public aren't enacted soon, according to Microsoft President Brad Smith. Smith made the comments to the BBC news program "Panorama" on May 26, during an episode focused on the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and the race between the United States and China to develop the technology. The warning comes about a month after the European Union released draft regulations attempting to set limits on how AI can be used. There are few similar efforts in the United States, where legislation has largely focused on limiting regulation and promoting AI for national security purposes. "I'm constantly reminded of George Orwell's lessons in his book '1984,'" Smith said.

Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott grew up fascinated by the 1960s Apollo space program and then-President John F. Kennedy's vision of a moon shot. Now, he envisions just as ambitious a project taking shape as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic. Just as the U.S. government significantly invested to put Neil Armstrong and others on the moon by 1969 – $200 billion in today's dollars by his estimate – Scott said similar funding in artificial intelligence technology could be a difference-maker for our nation's battered health care system. Scott, 48, whose new book about AI will be released Tuesday, said using the technology to detect underlying health conditions could not only help treat patients and prevent the spread of future pandemics, but also reduce care costs for Americans, tens of millions of which are uninsured. "Instead of a'moon shot,' our moon shot should be something like radically transforming health care for the public good,'' Scott said. "We all know the cost of delivering ubiquitous, high-quality health care is very high and growing faster than [gross domestic product].

Microsoft UK's chief envisioning officer Dave Choplin made some strong statements at an artificial intelligence conference last Thursday. Sam Shead of Business Insider wrote about Choplin's claim that AI is "the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today." Currently, most people's interactions with AI are limited to asking Cortana or Siri to help with simple tasks like scheduling appointments or making phone calls. Those small incremental improvements to our digital assistants might make AI seem like something other than the game changer that Choplin envisions. But as AI improves with advances in deep neural nets and machine learning algorithms, the technology stands the chance to amplify virtually everything in life.

A big claim was made at a conference in London on Thursday. Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at Microsoft UK, told an audience of business leaders at an AI conference that AI is "the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today." Before we go any further, it's worth putting that claim into perspective. There are a number of consumer-facing AI products already out there on the market that are getting better all the time -- Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, and Apple's Siri. But AI also has the potential to support crucial scientific research into everything from autonomous cars to cancer research.

This week at the Microsoft Build conference, CEO Satya Nadella spent a lot of time talking up chat bots, robots that help you get stuff done through normal human conversations. But for those of us who remember using Microsoft Office in the 1990s and early 2000s, the concept raises the specter of Clippy -- the paper-clip-shaped, animated help tool that was supposed to answer basic questions in plain speech, but became an icon of annoyance. Clippy debuted to much fanfare in Microsoft Office 97 and appeared in other products, such as Microsoft Publisher. But the negative reaction to Clippy caused Microsoft to gradually phase him out. And by 2008, Clippy had disappeared completely, without a trace or any explanation.