In Public Health, Artificial Intelligence will not eat your lunch. People who know how to use it will.
Think of it as a really, really, really good calculator.
When I worked on my doctoral degree, I had to learn biostatistics at a higher level than what I had learned for my master of public health (MPH) degree. This included learning ways to do mathematics that were new to me. While I used the kind services of some of my friends who were better at “biostats” than I was, I also used a lot of help from online sources.
Some of those sources were online calculators where I could enter the values I wanted to analyze and get results. They’re not complicated calculators, because everything is a formula. Those online calculators just took my input and placed the right numbers in the right places for the formulas. However, they helped me find the right answers when I was in a bind, or they helped confirm the answers I was getting in my own data analysis.
“Trust, but verify,” the Skipper always said.
With the dawn of more advanced artificial intelligence tools becoming widely available to everyone, the fear is that those tools will some day replace the work that we’re doing. Instead of coming to me to help investigate an outbreak, someone might just go to an AI and ask…
