Artificial Intelligence is Alien Intelligence

Imagine if an alien came to earth and told us some new scientific fact that no human had ever known. Artificial intelligence is starting to do just that. Computers and AI have long given us solutions to problems that humans could not have worked out for themselves but AI is going beyond optimization to tell us facts about the world that no one suspected. Eric Topol on twitter points us to a paper in Nature that used deep learning to analyze retinal images to predict heart disease–it’s long been known that this can be done which is one reason why ophthalmologists take a close look at your retinas when fitting lenses but not surprisingly the AI can see more than can ophthalmologists. What was surprising, however, was that the AI could also tell gender from retinal images, a fact no one had ever previously considered! As a summary notes:

…that information in a retinal image can be used for the prediction of a person’s gender is surprising and puzzling. This underscores the potential of artificial intelligence to revolutionize the way medicine is practiced and to help discover hidden associations.