MIT Sloan Management Review Article on But Will the Algorithms Have Empathy?

Every day, we hear about smart machines with new capabilities: computers that can outplay chess masters or are capable of processing natural language to answer increasingly complex questions; new cars that alert us when the driver in front of us hits the brakes, when we drift out of our designated lanes, or when a pedestrian suddenly steps off the curb. But how soon will it be before smart machines perform complex, multifaceted services such as looking out for our health?

In a recent article in The New Yorker, “A.I. Versus M.D.,” Siddhartha Mukherjee, a hematologist and oncologist at Columbia University Medical Center, describes the increasingly nuanced role computers are playing in cancer screening. Twenty years ago, Mukherjee notes, computers were used by diagnosticians to help identify suspicious patterns or waveforms and, later, to confirm a hypothesis.