Crossing the chasm is a seminal book on technology marketing written by Geoffery Moore, which talks about how disruptive technology products and services are sold, and thereby adopted in more traditional industries. As a physician with an MBA building a technology start-up in the artificial intelligence (AI) space, I think about crossing the chasm of AI adoption in healthcare a lot. The idea is simple, how does one make technology which is so useful that all users (or at least the great majority of users) adopt it and gain the benefits of it. What this means is that the onus of adoption is not on the users but on the builders and sellers of the technology itself. More on this later.
Coming to the topic at hand–AI. While many definitions of AI exist, ranging from machines getting the ability to do tasks that humans can do, to machines developing the ability to learn tasks themselves, the one that I am personally most drawn to is called Tesler’s Theorem – AI is whatever machines cannot do yet. Do you know that today, if you are alive, there is absolutely no doubt that you are using AI, or that AI is impacting your life? Anytime you search anything on Google Search, or use Google Maps, or order food on Zomato, you are using AI. Every time you type using your phone keyboard, draft an email on Google or even see the news – there is an AI engine at the back end. In fact, today, most magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scanners out there are using AI to create the beautiful images that we are used to seeing! Do you even think of any of this as AI? Not really – why? because AI is a moving target. Imagine, back in 1954, when the term AI was coined by John McCarthy, if someone would have turned up with a ‘simple’ accounting calculator, it would have been the epitome of human intelligence being put into a machine! Today, we do not consider a calculator as a smart device, let alone AI. AI, again, is a moving target.
Link to complete publication here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=dqpMNRUAAAAJ&cstart=20&pagesize=80&citation_for_view=dqpMNRUAAAAJ:70eg2SAEIzsC
