According to Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates’ year-end letter posted last week, the general populace in industrialized countries such as the United States will begin to use artificial intelligence to a “significant” degree within the next 18 to 24 months. According to Gates, the impact on things like productivity and innovation might be unprecedented.
“Artificial intelligence is about to accelerate the rate of discoveries at a pace we’ve never seen before,” Gates wrote in a post on his blog.
Gates, who co-founded the Gates Foundation with their former wife, Melinda French Gates, centered his views in the letter on the applications of artificial intelligence in underdeveloped countries. “A key priority of the Gates Foundation in AI is ensuring these tools also address health issues that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest, like AIDS, TB, and malaria,” Gates said in a statement.
Gates lists several applications of AI in various countries while stressing that practical deployment will occur later this decade rather than this year.
“The work that will be done over the next year is setting the stage for a massive technology boom later this decade,” with the use of artificial intelligence, wrote Gates.
Gates cites the following examples of artificial intelligence (AI) being created for use in education and disease combat in his letter:
- Fighting antimicrobial resistance (AMR), A researcher at Ghana’s Aurum Institute is developing a software tool that will sift through volumes of information “including local clinical guidelines and health surveillance data about which pathogens are currently at risk of developing resistance in the area, and make suggestions for the best drug, dosage, and duration.”
- AI-driven tailored education, such as “Somanasi” in Nairobi, which “has been designed with the cultural context in mind so that it feels familiar to the students who use it.”
- Reducing hazards during pregnancy, considering that “a woman dies in childbirth every two minutes” globally on average. Armman is developing a health worker “Copilot” software tool in India for nurses and midwives seeking to “improve the odds for new mothers in India” that adjusts to the aid worker’s expertise level.
- A chatbot to evaluate the risk of HIV that “acts like an unbiased and nonjudgmental counselor who can provide around-the-clock advice,” with a focus on “marginalized and vulnerable populations” who are wary of discussing their sexual history with doctors.
- A voice-powered smartphone software for Pakistani health workers that allows them to talk into a prompt to fill up a medical health record when visiting a patient in the field, bridging the gap where “many people don’t have any documented medical history.”
Gates emphasizes the AI applications being developed in individual countries, which will be more in line with the actual conditions of those countries. For instance, the voice input feature of the “Pakistan Health Records app” is in line with how people often use their phones to communicate: by speaking rather than typing.
