In an op-ed for USA Today, Dr. Moore compared the current hype surrounding AI’s potential uses in healthcare to the excitement sparked by the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003.
“The reality is, AI isn’t exactly new: It’s been a part of medicine, to varying degrees, since the 1970s, even before the Human Genome Project was tackled. And AI has been wrestling with the data from that project and its derivatives for decades now, with limited success,” Dr. Moore wrote.
That said, AI has been more successful than the Human Genome Project in its ability to tackle similar issues in disease detection at an exponential rate. Additionally, Dr. Moore noted, AI programs can factor entire populations’ worth of patterns, mutations and outliers into problem-solving processes, while scientists using the Human Genome Project had only the data for a single human body to work with.
“Learning from the past, if we can just meter our excitement and allow for this technology to be developed at a reasonable pace, with realistic goals, it’s possible that we could reach some of the heights we’d always hoped,” he wrote. “We need to realize, once again, that nothing in medicine ever comes easy, and all of the intelligence in the world, artificial or not, won’t change that.”
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