AI can make world a more equitable place: Bill Gates

If we make smart investments now, artificial intelligence (AI) can make the world a more equitable place, reducing or even eliminating the lag time between when the rich world gets an innovation and when the poor world does, billionaire Bill Gates has said. In a blog post titled ‘The road ahead reaches a turning point in 2024,’ the Microsoft Co-founder said that we can learn a lot from global health about how to make AI more equitable. “The main lesson is that the product must be tailored to the people who will use it,” he wrote. One of the biggest impacts so far is on creating new medicines. Drug discovery requires combing through massive amounts of data, and “AI tools can speed up that process significantly”. “Some companies are already working on cancer drugs developed this way. But a key priority of the Gates Foundation in AI is ensuring these tools also address health issues that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest, like AIDS, TB, and malaria,” he stressed. Can AI combat antibiotic resistance? Nana Kofi Quakyi from the Aurum Institute in Ghana is working on an AI-powered tool that helps health workers prescribe antibiotics without contributing to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). “The tool will comb through all the available information—including local clinical guidelines and health surveillance data about which pathogens are currently at risk of developing resistance in the area—and make suggestions for the best drug, dosage, and duration,” Gates informed.