By Richard Harris, NPR All Things Considered (podcast) | April 22, 2019
One of the biggest corporations on the planet is taking a serious interest in the intersection of artificial intelligence and health.
Google and its sister companies, parts of the holding company Alphabet, are making a huge investment in the field, with potentially big implications for everyone who interacts with Google — which is more than a billion of us.
The push into AI and health is a natural evolution for a company that has developed algorithms that reach deep into our lives through the Web.
“The fundamental underlying technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence are applicable to all manner of tasks,” says Greg Corrado, a neuroscientist at Google. That’s true, he says, “whether those are tasks in your daily life, like getting directions or sorting through email, or the kinds of tasks that doctors, nurses, clinicians and patients face every day.”
Corrado knows a bit about that. He helped Google develop the algorithm that Gmail uses to suggest replies.
The company also knows the value of being in the health care sphere. “It’s pretty hard to ignore a market that represents about 20 percent of [U.S.] GDP,” says John Moore, an industry analyst at Chilmark Research. “So whether it’s Google or it’s Microsoft or it’s IBM or it’s Apple, everyone is taking a look at what they can do in the health care space.”
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