MIT developed an AI that can recognize COVID based on a quick cough. It has false positives (because you could have the flu or something), but it’s apparently very sensitive even for asymptomatic cases. They’re seeking FDA approval to create an app.
Which is just amazing and wonderful and could end the pandemic and all future pandemics.
What’s more, it can tell if you have Covid just by passive listening. It could even listen to a room and tell if someone in the room has Covid.
It all comes down to the fact that AI can listen better than people. They developed it by merging with an AI that they were already working on to detect Alzheimers in your voice.
I’m dropping this in the Brand New Black Mirror thread, because this seems like the tip of an iceberg. Coughing into my phone before going into a restaurant is great. But what happens when I diagnose my boss with alzheimer’s based on a phone call. And who even knows what else is hidden in our voices… Generally seems like another case of rubbing the Big Data/ Deep Learning lamp.
Is there a BM episode on this? I don’t recall, and I’m a pretty big BM fan.
Are you just saying this in the futuristic sense?
I’m not surprised computers can do this better than humans, humans can’t see the whole spectrum of light, or hear the whole spectrum of sounds. Humans are also bad at doing most things (hand shakes during surgery, bad drivers, gets tired, drink and do drugs often that affect everything else they do)
Is this any different than noticing that your boss has pink eye or a giant pimple? Some diseases can’t be hidden. With the tech you’re describing, fewer diseases can be hidden from the public.
It involves bigger secrets. People are private about their health stuff. Thus hipaa. We could add blackmail, wrongful firing, etc…
It also has a history-- we could diagnose family members who are dead now, for example…
It’s also official, making it a bit different from a hunch. Lots of hunches don’t mean much until an expert confirms them.
To make our black mirror episode better, we’d want something more juicy. We’re talking covid now, but presumably there’s other secrets, like emotions, stresses, thinking. A lie detector. A crime detector. An iq detector. A detector for relationship issues, Etc.
(To be fair I don’t like BM type shows, because it generally takes things unrealistically too far)
Yeah, but when everyone can tell what everyone else has, what really is there to blackmail? It’s mutually assured destruction. Kind of like people who hooked up holding each other’s nude pics.
I suppose it’s a bit embarrassing if you have a big herpes sore on your lip for everyone to see. That stigma is confusing to me, since 50% of the people have herpes.
I was quite fascinated by the duplication of consciousness episodes. Those don’t seem too far fetched to me. I like that it tackled both ends, creating a paradise, or use it for punishment/eternal torture
I didn’t watch, but various notions of uploaded or vatted brains is pretty classic. There’s a Roald Dahl story from the 50s where a jerk husband achieves immortality, and his wife sits around torturing his brain.
On the whole I think the “uploading” concept is kind of myopic. It runs into scientific and philosophical. issues… and if we do get to a point where we can create artificial minds (reasonable) – we would be like Gods, capable of creating things much larger than ourselves. So it sounds petty that we would instead just make singular clones of ourselves.
That said, I could see using AIs to convincingly imitate an individual. And certainly there’s something to be said for inventing new and better tortures, which humans do seem to excel at.
Not sure if it’s a symptom, as I don’t think I’ve known anyone actively with COVID.
But if you are asymptomatic, you’ll have to consciously make a cough into the app as opposed to an involuntary one.
Because, detecting COVID conductors prior to the existence of symptoms is (imo) Priority #1.
Well, I did read there (or somewhere) that the app could possibly be programmed into your Alexa, alerting you that someone in the room might have COVID. That would be cool, and scary.
