THE science of medicine and the associated healthcare service are probably the two most prominent areas where the influence of artificial intelligence on contemporary life could be best identified. Countries the world over, be they developed or developing, are actively engaging in plans to spread the application and use of AI in their national healthcare services. AI proliferation into the many sector of healthcare may not at peak, but the trend to do so is constantly curving up, pairing in this process with the demonstrably increasing traffic of AI from academic institutions and research centres to healthcare outlets. There, it is becoming all the more familiar now to hear of the use of big or mega data analyses in identifying the spread of diseases and, probably more importantly, in formulating such precise diagnoses as to put forward exact and potent medications. Simultaneously, AI-assisted surgeries are on the increase and robotic devices are now enabling surgeons to perform an increasing number of critical operations. It’s indeed a highly valuable form of the advancement of science-based healthcare. A reading of the course that medicine and health care have followed would suggest that the accomplishments in these two fields have in the span of just one century probably exceed in volume and efficiency the findings and advances that had been achieved over preceding centuries.
The status of AI penetration of medicine and healthcare points to the huge potentials that the science of artificial intelligence and associated technologies hold for future generations to enjoy in almost all walks of life—so much so that artificial intelligence has been widely defined as the fourth industrial revolution, sometimes alternately called Industry 4.0. Even now when artificial intelligence is still in its early stages, there are predictions that the science and associated technologies can outdo humans in performing certain tasks in what scholars refer to as artificial superintelligence (ASI). And there are suggestions that artificial intelligence can far as far as to help compose music through invoking certain algorithms that enable the fast and likely inexpensive production of melodies and tunes.
Though the trend, by traditional thinking, conflicts with the age-old notion that only human skills and individual talents can produce music and other artistic and literary creations, there seems to be no known theoretical limits so far for the prospects of employing such algorithms that can do in talent-based human activities what AI and machine learning are already doing. Whether the AI-assisted composition appeals or not to the individual taste of art fans remains an open question, depending of course on the level machine learning would reach in composing music. Royalties and intellectual property rights constitute another essential question, since music-composing machines are no natural persons to be royalty-recipients. These and like-wise questions would find answers when compositional AI can grow and deliver large-scale production for unrestricted or free public listening. Whatever the answers would or could be, the more human effort is exerted to advance AI applications, the more will it be possible for larger audiences to enjoy multi-faceted streaming of machine-composed music. AL is indeed making its fingerprints traceable even in the non-physical aspects of life.
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