ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Can You Think of More Tasks Where AI Might Help?

A startup might be in your future if you can

I had an idea! Photo of and by author

AI is already being used in medical drug research, legal research, and much more. This story is an interesting application.

[embed]Doctors Told Him He Was Going to Die. Then A.I. Saved His Life. Scientists are using machine learning to find new treatments among thousands of old medicines.www.nytimes.com

Coming April 9th, 2025: How Are Tariffs, Chips, AI, and Automation Related?

It seems to me that there might be some risk here, but isn’t there always? Aren’t AI conclusions likely better than, oh, say some old fool recommending using bleach to cure COVID?

When I read that, I started wondering if there are other ways AI could be used to extract information from overwhelming data. For example, AI is being used in law enforcement to enhance blurry images, match fingerprints faster, and analyze DNA sequences to solve cold cases. But couldn’t it also be deployed for other detective work?

I was probably thinking about that because we watched a few episodes of the new Netflix show “*The Residence*” last night. That’s a fun romp about an eccentric detective who solves a murder at the White House by linking a large number of clues. An AI analysis of a crime might suggest avenues to explore by looking at all physical evidence and all interview transcripts. I don’t know if anyone has done this yet, but it might be very helpful.

Hey, you could test this by giving an AI the transcript of most any detective mystery book but leaving out the solution. Could the AI do that?

Maybe there are other unexplored applications. How about AI-Assisted memory recall for people with cognitive decline? AI might help by sifting through old photos, videos, and anything the impaired person had written plus verbal evidence from friends and relatives. It could then have very natural conversations that could be very helpful.

My wife suffers from severe arthritis and blindly takes medicine to deal with the pain. A personal AI trained on her medical history, activity, food consumption, genetics, sleep patterns, and responses to its questions could track what drugs she takes, and when she takes them. At appropriate times, it could ask her to rate her pain in order to develop a more tailored pain management plan.

If there were a simple way to analyze a person’s gut microbiome at home, an AI could create a helpful personalized nutrition plan.

A personal AI could also provide emotional support and mental therapy. Online therapists don’t know enough about personal details; a personal and private AI could add this to its abilities.

Small farmers perhaps could compete more with the agricultural behemoths if the little guys had their own AI to know soil details, water purity, local weather, and so on to optimize planting, detect diseases, and predict yields. The big guys already do this.

Somebody — probably Apple, Google, and a few others — is likely already thinking about all these things in conjunction with personal robots. But they may have missed something where a small company or even an individual could carve out a market.

Maybe someone like you?

Buy me a coffee? I’m too old and tired to start a new business.

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