LOS ANGELES – Correspondent Miles O’Brien gets agitated when he reads the “doom and gloom” stories about artificial intelligence.
“There are so many cool things happening – curing or preventing diseases, addressing climate change – we don’t do it justice,” he says. “We tend to throw a little problem bomb in the public square, light the fuse and run away.”
Still, O’Brien has seen first-hand how important A.I. can be.
Ten years ago, the Emmy-winning journalist had his left arm amputated after a case of TV gear fell on it and caused acute compartment syndrome. Without the surgery, he might have died.
Since then, O’Brien has had a series of prostheses and, most recently, got one that looks like something out of “The Terminator.”
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“This whole thing is about a six-figure operation,” he says, pointing to his prosthesis. “I was kind of hoping for a LUKE arm (the only commercially available prosthesis with a powered shoulder, allowing shoulder-level amputee to reach over his or her head) but, frankly, (his prosthesis) has been a middle-of-the-road thing. It’s a little bit frustrating … but it’s an amazing thing … it’s good for holding a drink but it’s not like I can play the piano.”
Still working on finger control, O’Brien says he might have more flexibility if he had an elbow. Those who do, “have many more nerves, much more fidelity and control. As you go up the chain, it gets harder and harder (to get that control).” Other options, however, are possible. “State of the art is to put a titanium rod in your bone, have it stick out and attach directly to nerves.”
The benefits of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence has helped doctors share information that leads to these kinds of advancements. “We’re all linked to machines in a way that enhances us,” O’Brien says. “As time goes on, these chips, gadgets, machines will be onboard our bodies one way or another. Look at people with cochlear implants. Slowly, but surely, we are becoming bioengineered, and I don’t think that’s necessarily bad.”
In the “Nova” special “A.I. Revolution,” O’Brien looks at those advances and talks about ones that need a bit more study.
“A.I. is very good at summarizing documents,” says Alexander Amini, a researcher with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “It’s very good at objective tasks, but it’s not very good at creative tasks. They’re generating new words on a screen … but they’re lacking that subjectivity, that creativeness that is intrinsically a very human quality.”
Adds O’Brien: “A.I. takes content, dresses it up and spits it back at you in a different way. This is why it’s so important to have this conversation about these and other things right now. We missed that conversation when Silicon Valley was young and they said, ‘Oh, we can’t have guardrails.’ And look at the mess that’s created.”
ChatGPT among new tools for journalists, physicians
When O’Brien started on the “Nova” installment, he consulted A.I. to help him craft the episode. “They gave me this fabulous outline, but it’s not like I sat down and did that film. It just changed the way I worked as a writer. It triggered my brain in a different way. But it’s just another tool. It’s not going to replace (reporters) going out and talking to people. It’s relying on our hard work to make it look smart.”
Using such equipment “expands our brains, in a way.”
Using something like ChatGPT, for example, could bring more information to a physician, filtering disparate sources of information and digesting the results in a format that’s simple enough for someone to understand.
In the pharmaceutical industry, A.I. has been leveraged to address all of the challenges associated with efficiency, says Petrina Kamya, head of A.I. platforms for Insilico Medicine. “You can really expedite the time it takes from discovery, at least to get into the clinical stage, in terms of improving efficiency, improving the understanding of the underlying causes and of diseases and improving the speed it takes you to optimize a potential therapy. All of that can save up to years of preclinical studies.”
The goal, Kamya says, is to come up with cures for diseases, not just drugs that give a patient four or five years.
O’Brien found the upside of A.I. after his arm was amputated. “I had never seen a one-arm TV guy,” he says. “On top of that, I was a freelancer – I eat what I kill – and I had all these stories I’d shot and I had to get out the door. One of the first things I did was open my computer and use something that I had barely used before – a little piece of A.I. called ‘Dragon dictate.’ And I started dictating scripts and that honestly helped me turn a corner because I saw myself going, ‘Oh, I can do this.’”
“Nova: A.I. Revolution” airs March 27 on PBS.
Bruce Miller is editor of the Sioux City Journal.
