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Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang foresees a future where artificial intelligence (AI) and the automation of jobs will lead to the disintegration of our society with human workers being replaced by machines, which is one of his main campaign messages.

As stated in a November 2019 article by Martin Ford in The Hill: “AI and automation will disrupt our world — but only Andrew Yang is warning about it”. The article also includes these statistics:

A recent report from the consulting firm Deloitte found that, among more than a thousand surveyed American executives, 63 percent agreed with the statement that “to cut costs, my company wants to automate as many jobs as possible using AI,” and 36 percent already believe that job losses from AI-enabled automation should be viewed as an ethical issue.

The statements are usually attributed to manufacturing jobs and low-paid jobs, definitely not highly educated professionals, like lawyers, doctors, or scientists. Yet lawyers and doctors will also see a decline in demand when AI takes over decision making in their fields. But for those decisions to be made, the machines will have to learn correctly. So, what kind of humans will still be needed to perform any work that machines cannot do?

Apart form certain service industry jobs where humans prefer human touch or human communication such as nurses, masseuses, waiters, the only other jobs that will not only be available but highly requested besides computer and robot programmers, are data scientists. Data scientists clean and prepare the data and configure the machine learning models to learn from the data.

An IBM survey by a different Wang (Dakuo Wang et al 2019) looked at “Human-AI Collaboration in Data Science: Exploring Data Scientists’ Perceptions of Automated AI”. The goal of the study was to understand data scientists current work practices and how these practices might change with Automated AI (AutoAI). Reactions were reported to be mixed with some expressing concern about the trend of automating their jobs which they also strongly felt was inevitable while others remained optimistic about their future job security due to a view that the future of data science work will be a collaboration between humans and AI systems.

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There are ongoing efforts to merge your health data and have it in a central place. Other efforts involve transferring or exchanging your health data between hospitals and doctors and you look forward to not having to spend 20 minutes filling out the same paper form you filled out at another doctor’s office. Yes, that will happen, eventually. But should this central place that holds your data only serve your doctors or should the information it contains directly guide your life style and life choices? You have read that eventually, a smart computer will access your health data and make a faster, more accurate diagnosis or create a personalized treatment plan. You have read that such a system will make recommendations on your diet, your physical exercise regimen and even your social life and your career (work less, take time off). These recommendations will help you lead a happier, healthier and fuller life. It is already happening today, with apps like Fitbit and MyFitnessPal being pioneers in the field.

Today, doctors, clinics and hospitals have portions of your health data. It is spread across filing cabinets, devices, and the computers owned by these institutions. According to HIPPA regulations you can ask for that data but the data collected at a particular health provider belongs to him or her. Now consider this: 23andme and similar institutions have your genetic data but they don’t have your doctors’ health data. uBiome has your microbiome data but nothing else. Your Fitbit or similar fitness tracker has your fitness data but they don’t have your genetic data or your medical health history. You have been recording your weight and consumed calories in applications like MyFitnessPal, but nobody but you has that data. Ultimately, you have the right to access and own all that data and share it as you seem fit.

Omics Help Desk

Data Archives - Omics Help Desk

Tag: Data

Discussing Yang’s Claim in the Context of a Healthcare Human-in-the-Loop AI Model

Fitness, Diet, Clinical, Genome, Microbiome Data, it is All Yours