No. 114/2022

T he entire world is chock-a-block with AI. It is not only found in smartphones and loudspeakers; it also doses the detergent in washing machines, provides driver assistance features, sorts out spam e-mails and translates texts. Humanity has artificial intelligence to thank for breakthroughs in areas like gene sequencing, which facilitated the development of those efficacious mRNA vaccines in the fight against the Covid pandemic. In some areas of medicine, humans and AI work hand-in-hand – in breast cancer screening in radiology, for example. Here, the findings are assessed according to the four-eyes principle: the images are examined separately by two individuals. It is now often artificial intelligence that takes on the role of the second assessor. With the aid, amongst other things, of artificial neural networks, the computer scientist, Daniel Rückert, has significantly improved the quality of medical imaging. The Alexander von Humboldt Professor for AI at the Technical University of Munich is convinced that the strengths of AI and those of humans complement each other ideally. “Of course, humans have the advantage that they can interpret images correctly even if they don’t look like the ones they trained with. On the other hand, people make mistakes, for example when they are tired. The huge advantage of machine learning or AI models is that they always give In March 2016, one of the world’s best Go players lost four of his five matches against the computer programme, AlphaGo. › 13 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 114/2022