An Article By, David Tan, Chief Technology Officer
If you’ve read any articles or blogs that I’ve written, you’ve probably figured out what a huge fan I am of technology. From cool new toys and gadgets to software and systems that change the way we live and work, the ever-changing landscape of this industry keeps me energized every day. Usually when I write about interesting new technology, I’m relating it to things you can do in your business. Ways to increase profits or productivity, or even new services you can start offering your customers. This is going to be a little different. Today I want to talk about how the advances in technology can benefit us in our lives on a daily basis.
One of the themes I’ve talked and written a lot about
recently is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. People are worried that computers will
continue to get smarter and robots will get better and suddenly there will be
no jobs left for humans! Obviously, this
isn’t the case. AI is going to make our
world a better place. Artificial
Intelligence isn’t about replacing people, it’s about improving our abilities
and finding ways to make us better at what we do. To show that, I want to talk about an amazing
article I read recently.
I’m very fortunate in that I have never been impacted by
suicide in my life directly. I know many
people who have and it’s a devastating experience to have someone you care
about take their own life. Nearly 45,000
Americans take their lives every year, 120 a day. Yet despite the magnitude of this issue,
there has been precious little advancement in the study of suicide
prevention. A recent study by a Florida
State Psychology Assistant Professor revealed that 50 years of suicide
prediction research had not produced any real progress in being able to predict
who will try to kill themselves. The traditional risk factors identified over
the past half century to predict suicidal behavior — such as depression, stress
or substance abuse — could muster an accuracy rate not much better than random
guessing. A coin flip is as accurate on
suicide attempts as the brightest suicide experts in the world.
However, there is hope.
Jessica Ribeiro, a psychology researcher at Florida State recently
published a paper titled “Predicting Risk of Suicide Attempts over Time through
Machine Learning.” In the paper, it finds
that machine learning can predict with 80-90 percent accuracy whether someone
will attempt suicide as far off as two years into the future. The algorithms become even more accurate as a
person’s suicide attempt gets closer. For example, the accuracy climbs to 92
percent one week before a suicide attempt when artificial intelligence focuses
on general hospital patients.
The data for the research comes from over 2 million
anonymous patient electronic health records.
Of the patients, 3200 attempted suicide.
Intelligent machines are able to sort through and understand the data at
a rate that is impossible to humans.
Plus, they can pick up the most unperceivable of signals in the data
that no person could ever grasp. Being
able to analyze so much data at once allows the computer to create
hypotheses. These are then tested and
tweaked and refined over time as more and more data is ingested. Ultimately, the computer develops a model it
can use to compare data in real-time and hopefully, in this case, create some
sort of an early warning system for at-risk patients.
You see technology in general and artificial intelligence
specifically is not about replacing people.
It’s about finding ways to accomplish things that humans just can’t do
on their own. We have spent decades
building better, faster and smarter technology.
It’s wonderful when it can be used to make our world a better
place. We all owe it to ourselves to
embrace these advances and find other ways we can use them for good.
