Future Bites #3
AI detects breast cancer, translating voices into other languages, debunking arguments against EVs, how ChatGPT can help you learn new skills, and more.
Welcome back to Year 2049 🔮
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Today’s Edition:
Cartoon: AI and creative work
Stories:
How AI is helping breast cancer detection
Microsoft researchers demo AI that converts your voice into foreign languages
Debunking common arguments against EVs with data
Resources:
A ChatGPT prompt that will help you learn or improve your skills
A collection of high-quality AI-generated art
Cartoon
AI and creative work
Stories
How AI is helping breast cancer detection
Five hospitals and clinics in Hungary have been using AI software to help doctors during their breast cancer screening program. An NYT report detailed how the program has performed so far:
The five hospitals and clinics perform 35,000 screenings each year as part of Hungary’s breast cancer screening program
Since 2021, the AI has identified cancer missed by radiologists in 22 cases, with 40 more under review
The AI isn’t used as a replacement for doctors: each mammogram is reviewed by two radiologists first, then the AI either agrees or flags areas to check again
For example, AI can identify tiny but high-risk lesions that may develop into cancer. This information would help radiologists decide on additional tests to assess the patient’s situation, according to Dr. Larry Norton.
The present: Scotland, England, Finland, and Oman are some of the countries that will start introducing AI software to breast cancer screening starting this year.
The future: Image recognition is one of AI’s earliest and most reliable use cases. These tools will continue to improve and elevate radiologists’ performance and catch early risks that might usually go unnoticed.
Microsoft researchers demo AI that converts your voice into foreign languages
A team of Microsoft researchers demoed VALL-E X, a language model for cross-lingual speech synthesis. The intention is to translate your voice into different languages while maintaining your unique tone and inflections.
I highly recommend visiting the demo website to preview how they translated English voices to speak Chinese and vice versa. It’s not perfect, but the speaker’s voice being translated in VALL-E X is impressively similar.
The future: While this research is still in the earliest experimental stages, I can imagine many useful cases for it. The first one that comes to mind is dubbing TV shows and movies using the characters’ own voices instead of overlaying another actor’s voice in a different language.
Debunking common arguments against EVs with data
I have to reshare
's recent post on why electric cars are better for the climate than petrol or diesel, backed by data.Whenever EVs are brought up, the focus is placed on the high emissions during production rather than the significant emissions avoided while driving. The main takeaways from Hannah’s article:
EVs lead to more emissions during production, but this quickly pays back once people start driving. In the long term, they can reduce a car’s emissions by 50% over a 10-year lifetime.
When EVs are charged by renewables or nuclear energy, their carbon footprint is significantly reduced: emissions from driving the vehicle are zero.
Hannah writes
, and it has quickly become one of my favourite sources for optimistic and data-driven writing about sustainability, climate, and energy.
Resources
#1: How to use ChatGPT to learn or improve your skills
When we need to learn new skills, we have a hard time deciding where to start or how to structure our learning. Earlier this week, I discovered a prompt that ChatGPT could help us with that.
In the example above, I used UX Design as the skill. For your own prompt, replace the elements between the square brackets to reflect the profession or skill that is relevant to you.
I posted a video showing my own experiment with this on Instagram.
#2: A collection of high-quality AI-generated art
Writing good prompts to generate AI art is an art of its own. Luckily, there’s a website called Lexica where you can access and download a huge collection of existing AI art made with Stable Diffusion.
How would you rate this week's edition?