Brilliant article from Steven Levy on Backchannel.

When I covered Kasparov-Deep Blue match, I thought the drama came from a battle between computer and human. But it was really a story of people, with brutal capitalist impulse, teaming up with AI to destroy the confidence and dignity of the greatest champion the world had seen. That leads me to believe it’s not Skynet that should worry us about AI, but rather the homo sapiens who build, implement, and employ those systems.

Well, this is all about one of the great issues of our age. As I wrote in 2008:

Change in medicine is increasingly driven by the twin forces of specialization, and the desire to codify medical practice, i.e. to produce rules that can be followed by those from a range of educational and professional backgrounds. The battle is over the intellectual heartlands of clinical practice and how the knowledge that underpins clinical practice is acquired, distributed and validated.

The mistake is to believe that this process is not mired in political and financial assumptions about what good care means — and who can make money out of it.