Bill Harvey: Coin-operated boy

I hope you enjoyed our update on the role of artificial intelligence in eye care in last week’s issue. Barely a week goes by without some new advance in AI being lauded, or someone warning of the danger in putting our trust in AI to make life-changing decisions.

The week began with a story about how five local authorities had adopted an algorithm to profile large numbers of people in a bid to predict those families where child abuse is most likely to occur, and therefore allow an intervention before this happened.

Using the logic of the Philip K Dick story Minority Report, this seems an eminently sensible approach to the use of resources and any episode of abuse being avoided surely justifies this system. Indeed, such predictive analysis has been used by some police forces in the past to distribute officers according to those areas as most likely to suffer a crime in the immediate future and have proved very successful.