For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet—dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like—in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing.

While there are certainly some questions that need answering when it comes to AI — like who self-driving cars should prioritize in the moment of an emergency — things aren’t quite so dire, at least not yet. In fact, there are several helpful things that AI or automated systems can do much better than humans.

It sounds a bit funny when you put it like that. You might even feel a little more uneasy knowing that, in some scenarios, putting your life in the hands of an AI platform is more beneficial than putting your life in the hands of a human. Let’s take a much closer look to find out exactly where all this is coming from.

Doctors are not infallible, that much we know. In fact, a lot of times the information they use to diagnose patients comes from the patient directly. In other words, what symptoms and problems you share may offer them the details they need to make a proper diagnosis.

This is not the only information they use to make a diagnosis, obviously, but if you tell the doctor improper symptoms or mix them up, it can be a problem.

Misdiagnoses are the cause of 251,454 deaths a year.

The most important take away from this is doctors and medical health professionals need assistance, especially when it comes to diagnosing patients. AI may offer the help they need.

AI is already being used to help surgeons improve detection analysis for tumours, as well as certain cancers like skin cancer. This is largely due to big data systems, which provide a vast array of data and information for the connected AI to reference.

For example, an AI could — and would — have access to a patient’s entire history for a diagnosis and can access all that information in mere seconds. Not only that, the system would have access to all health data ever collected and referenced. In this way, it could assess what it knows about the patient and compare it to past information it has gathered to make a proper diagnosis.

Human doctors don’t have the advantage of being quite so thorough.

Of course, systems like this will take a while to perfect. It takes time to collect the necessary data and make certain diagnoses before the system in question knows exactly what it’s doing, but we’ll get there. As you can see with the two cancer-related applications, AI has the potential to be much better at diagnosing ailments and illnesses.

Olatorera Consultancy Limited provides business development services to companies looking to grow, enter or do business in Africa. We also provide consultancy services to high net-worth individuals including politicians, business executives and aspirants.