糖心TV

Will AI revolutionise the decision sciences? A medical perspective.

Headlines about medical errors and health service failures appear more and more frequently in the media. The general public and health professionals are now aware that medical practice is facing enormous challenges that affect the quality and safety of our clinical services. This has generated public and political pressure to look for solutions; the press often wants to know who to blame, while the politically minded see the need for greater privatisation, organisational change or bigger budgets. This is a global problem, not just one for the NHS.

As a cognitive scientist I see many of the underlying problems as arising from human cognitive limitations and how we bring our knowledge to bear in our reasoning, decision-making, planning etc. For example, decision-making is pivotal to everything we do individually, in groups and in organisations. Uncertainty and risk make decision making difficult - and uncertainty and risk pervade medicine so medicine is a fascinating model for cognitive research. Indeed there is now much talk about how “cognitive computing” and artificial intelligence will “revolutionise medicine”.

This talk will briefly overview some of my research on human expertise and the use of AI in medicine. I will argue that AI systems based on an understanding of human cognition and decision-making can improve quality, safety and efficiency of patient care, perhaps more than political and managerial interventions can. AI and its subfields, like knowledge engineering and machine learning, are showing us how machines can do human-level tasks well, cope with uncertainty, manage risks better, make more objective, evidence-based choices, plan and act more effectively in complex and rapidly evolving situations, while allowing people to retain control.

Will AI will revolutionise medicine? we don’t know yet. However, I am also interested in the question - whether AI and its subsidiary fields, like knowledge representation and autonomous systems, offer significant new insights into human reasoning and decision-making. The possibility that the decision sciences might themselves be revolutionised by the new wave of AI seems ripe for discussion.