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by qup 956 days ago
Are you aware that AI is being used to identify and help treat many medical conditions, including cancer?

Do you not think that code is involved decreasing the cost of food production? We have tractors managing fields relatively autonomously, for instance.

You're making my point.

3 comments

Yes all of that is purely code and not a mix of multiple disciplines.

That is also done entirely by software developers and not electrical engineers and biologists...

Most actually useful software is a combination of multiple disciplines and the actual software part never needed someone with a computer science degree but a degree in a related field which also covered software development.

It's not a skill issue, it's a matter of software isn't the thing solving the problem in any way, it is only accelerating what was already possible without it.

Regarding your AI in cancer diagnosis a d autonomous tractors, these and not places where software pushed costs down but rather went the opposition direction and is still not available to the masses but instead are available to the 1% who were doing just fine without it.

All that stuff is being worked on by domain experts. I.e. you need to understand cancer or food production in order to think up the code that will help make progress on those subjects. Then, you either code it yourself if you have the coding skills and the time, or hire some coders to code it for you.

An example to help you understand this (as the term "domain expert" is foreign to you). You have a cancer researcher, who's spend years, or decades, learning whatever they can about cancer. They come up with a research problem which would be helped by some code - e.g. they want computer vision program to help them automatically classify some cells in pictures taken with a microscope. This image classification is in itself a small task in the grand scheme on studying cancer and ways to treat it, and it can't be even conceptualized without the deep domain knowledge the researcher has. This researcher is the "domain expert" I'm talking about.

I think you get me:)