1. AI is being used in many aspects of life including healthcare, defense, dating sites, and more. At Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, AI is being trained on eye scans to help diagnose eye diseases faster and more accurately than humans. 2. Predictive policing tools like PredPol used by Kent Police analyze historical crime data to predict crime hotspots. Patrols of these areas have led to increased arrests. However, over-reliance on such tools could exacerbate issues in poorer neighborhoods. 3. While AI shows great potential to improve healthcare, cybersecurity, retail, and more, its growing use also raises concerns about privacy, corporate control, and social impacts if not properly regulated and overseen

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The algorithms that are already changing your life
By.Dr.Mahboob ali khan Phd
From policing and healthcare to defence and dating sites AI is being
woven into the fabric of our lives – for better and for worse
It is hoped that AI will relieve some of the pressure on busy hospitals
by diagnosing disease and recommending treatment options quickly
and efficiently.
At Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, consultants are facing a
familiar problem.
Patient numbers are surging. Age-related eye diseases are becoming
more and more common, and as the British demographic gets ever
older, numbers are predicted to increase by between a third and one
half.
“We have enormous numbers of patients, we can barely cope,” says
Professor Peng Tee Khaw, a consultant ophthalmic surgeon. “We
need to look at new ways to deal with the issue.”

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When a patient arrives at Moorfields, doctors will likely perform an
eye scan that captures a 3D cross-section of the person’s retina. The
images are complex and beautiful, but often hide subtle signs of eye
disease. It takes an experienced pathologist to spot abnormalities and
decide what treatment is needed and how urgently.
The process is not a fast one, but artificial intelligence is about to
change that. Working with Google’s artificial intelligence
group, DeepMind, doctors at Moorfields have trained an AI on a
million anonymised eye scans from patients at various stages of age-
related macular degeneration. The hope is that the AI will learn to
spot the earliest signs of disease and ultimately deliver a diagnosis.
“If this is as accurate as a human being, the whole process of
diagnosing disease and understanding what needs to be done can be
done pretty well instantly,” says Khaw. It could make an enormous
difference to Moorfields patients: for some conditions, early treatment
can be sight-saving. The results so far are promising and a formal
clinical trial could start as early as next year, Khaw says.
The Moorfields project is just one of a slew of instances where AI is
making an impact. The technology is being woven into the fabric of
life, to help people communicate, travel, meet partners and get loans.
It targets customers to drive sales and monitors employees for
suspicious behaviour. At the same time, it helps the emergency
services, social workers and urban planners. For all its potential
benefits though, critics warn that the rapid proliferation of such a
powerful technology poses fresh threats to basic human rights,
privacy and society in general. “There are certain standards that need
to be in place for this to work well,” says Craig Fagan, policy director
at Tim Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation. “Companies have to make
sure that what they’re putting out is not creating social harm.”
Medicine is primed to be a chief beneficiary of artificial intelligence.
AI can diagnose diseases from telltale groups of symptoms, strange
patterns in blood tests, and the subtle abnormalities that cells display
as a disease begins takes hold. Time and again, AI systems are found
to pick up signs of illness that are unknown to doctors, making the

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AIs more accurate as a result. Earlier this year, researchers at
Nottingham University trained several AIs to spot people at risk of
heart attack and found that all of them performed better than doctors.
Another AI built at Stanford University in California has learned to
spot breast cancer in biopsy tissues. Pathologists typically make the
diagnosis after checking a handful of tissue features, but the
AI outperformed the cancer specialists by considering more than
6,000 factors.
Researchers have begun to use AI in mental health too. A Boston-
based company, Cogito, is trialling a mobile phone app that monitors
the tone of a person’s voice to detect mood changes that could flag a
bout of depression. In China, researchers want to spot those at risk of
suicide from their posts on Weibo, a Twitter-style microblogging
platform.
Treatment is also ripe for an AI-fuelled revolution. Algorithms trained
on piles of medical records can advise doctors on the most effective
drugs for the patient before them, taking into account their genetic
makeup and other conditions they have. Its success now relies as
much on finding effective ways to share patients’ medical data
without putting privacy at risk.
A UK government review of AI in October proposed “data trusts” that
would allow the NHS, for example, to share sensitive information
securely. Done well, the trusts could potentially prevent
more unlawful uses of data, as happened when the Royal Free
Hospital in London shared the health records of 1.6 million
identifiable patients with DeepMind for its own artificial intelligence
project.
Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of
New South Wales, and author of a recent book on AI called Android
Dreams, fears that a small number of tech giants could come to own
our health and other data, giving them enormous power over our lives.
“It will look like 1984, but it won’t be a government that’s in charge,

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it’ll be a corporation, and corporations are even less answerable than
governments,” Walsh said. “In 10 or 20 years time, if Google is not
broken up into separate parts, I will be severely worried for the future
of democracy.”
The boom in AI applications will reach far beyond medicine. Online
retailers have ramped up the use of AI to maximise sales; some dating
sites use the technology to match potential partners; and cities such as
Manchester are dabbling with AI-controlled traffic lights to ease
congestion and reduce air pollution.
AI-powered cyber defences have also arrived. The UK-based
company Darktrace uses AI to spot suspect activity on companies’
computer networks, a strategy that revealed the curious case of a
North American casino that was hacked from Finland via its wifi-
controlled fishtank. Darktrace recently detected a worrying new form
attack: while monitoring activity for an Indian company, the tech firm
spotted AI-enhanced malware that learned how to blend into its target
network and lurk there without detection. Since India is one of the
world’s testing grounds for new cyber attacks, more AI-powered
malware could soon be targeting companies around the world.
AI is already helping the police to tackle crime. In 2014, a Kent police
officer was on his way to interview the victim of a double motorbike
theft when he heard the meeting had been delayed. With an hour to
kill, the officer went to a nearby area that had been flagged that
morning as ripe for crime by PredPol, the force’s AI tool. During the
officer’s patrol, he spotted the missing motorbikes, made an arrest,
and had the bikes returned to their owner.
Kent police has pioneered predictive policing in Britain. Having
trialled and adopted PredPol, a US commercial product, in 2013, the
force has gained more experience than most. Sceptical at first, officers
introduced the tool after a trial revealed PredPol was 60% better at
spotting where where crimes would take place than the force’s
analysts. “There was nothing we could do that was more accurate,”
said Jon Sutton, head of transformation, performance and analysis at
Kent.

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A predictive policing tool, PredPol, uses artificial intelligence to learn
crime patterns from historical records and returns a daily list hotspots,
where it predicts the crime risk is high.
PredPol uses artificial intelligence to learn crime patterns from
historical records. The Kent system was trained on five years of crime
data, and the algorithm is now updated daily with the force’s most
recent three years of records. After crunching the data, PredPol
returns a daily list of 180 hotspots, each 500 foot by 500 foot, where it
predicts the crime risk is high. About 80% of the boxes never change:
some areas always attract more crime than others. But the rest move
around in line with patterns PredPol has learned from years of
criminal activity. Some patterns are obvious and follow the clock or
the seasons. There are more brawls near pubs and clubs at night time,
and more incidents around Kent’s beaches in the height of summer.
Others are more subtle and reflect trends in crimes, the movements of
gangs, or new vulnerabilities in particular neighbourhoods.

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The 180 PredPol hotspots cover about 0.1% of Kent, but within them,
about 17% of crime and 21% of antisocial behaviour takes place.
Officers are not sent to cover all the hotspots. Instead, the police,
along with community support officers and community wardens, are
briefed on the locations and conduct visible patrols in the area when
they can. “It’s one of a number of crime prevention tools, but our
officers have made arrests in areas where they say they wouldn’t have
been were it not for PredPol,” said Sutton. “We don’t see it as a
panacea. It doesn’t replace skills, knowledge and experience.”
Predictive policing has its critics though. A recent study by the
University of Utah found that the software could trigger “runaway
feedback loops” where officers are sent back to the same, often poor,
neighbourhoods time and again. The problem arises when police in a
hotspot make an arrest, leading the software to rank the area as an
even higher crime risk area in future, and so send more police back
the next day, regardless of the true crime rate.
In Kent, the police, community support officers and wardens only
patrol PredPol boxes between scheduled duties. With 70% of their
patrols having no power of arrest, the tool is primarily used to prevent
crime rather than catch criminals. One patrol, for example, noticed a
line of industrial bins lined up beneath open windows on a housing
estate. “It was just a case of putting the bins on the other side of the
car park,” said Nicola Endacott, Kent’s deputy head of analysis.
According to the government’s October AI review, the rise of AI has
brought us to the threshold of a new era, with profound implications
for society and the economy.
“Quality of life might very well be improved. In terms of solving the
big problems from climate change to the supply of energy, AI should
be able to help,” said Dame Wendy Hall, a co-author on the report.
“It’s going to be big.”