What Exactly is Open Access To AI and Why We Are Not There Yet in Healthcare? (Bart De Witte)

After an intense race in AI development lighted by the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, two important things happened in the last week of March 2023: Over 1000 tech workers, such as Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director at Mila, Turing Prize winner and professor at University of Montreal,

Stuart Russell, Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach",   signed a public letter that urges a pause on AI development before humanity as a society decides how humans can control the development. The first subscribers include: 

As the letter states, “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” 

A day after this letter was published, UNESCO published a press release that calls on all governments to immediately implement the global ethical framework, which 193 Member States of Unesco has unanimously adopted. As warned by Unesco, we need to address many concerning ethical issues raised by AI innovations, in particular discrimination and stereotyping, including the issue of gender inequality, but also the fight against disinformation, the right to privacy, the protection of personal data, and human and environmental rights. And the industry cannot self-regulate, states the press release. 

Healthcare is moving from the era of gathering data through digitalized systems, EHRs, sensors, and wearables to the era of mining that data for better patient outcomes and operational efficiency. 

However, in order for AI and algorithms to help improve the health of many, we should strive for algorithms to be open and transparent, says Bart De Witte, founder of HIPPO AI Foundation, a renowned expert on digital transformation in healthcare in Europe, who regularly speakers and posts about technology and innovation strategy, with a particular focus on the socioeconomic impact on healthcare. 

In this short discussion, recorded at the Vision Health Pioneers Demo Day on 28 March in Berlin, Bart explains: why is open and transparent AI important for the greater good in healthcare, where global medical development is going with different values and regulations about AI and data, and comments on the upcoming European Health Data Space. 

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Transcript: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/open-ai-bart-de-witte-gpt4

Open Letter to pause all AI development: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ 

Unesco Press release: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/artificial-intelligence-unesco-calls-all-governments-implement-global-ethical-framework-without