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Opinion: Artificial intelligence for medicine needs a Turing test. Obesity would be a good one

Demonstrating that artificial intelligence can create an effective alternative to weight-loss surgery would show the skeptics what medical AI can do. If it can't do this, it's time for medical…

If you read high-profile medical journals, the high-end popular press, and magazines like Science or Nature, it is clear that the medicalization of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data is in full swing. Speculation abounds about what these can do for medicine. It’s time to put them to the test.

From what I can tell, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data are mostly jargon for one of two things. The first is about bigger and bigger computers sifting through mountains of data to detect patterns that might be obscure to even the best trained and most skilled.

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