When the COVID-19 pandemic began we were all so full of hope.
We let our guard down.
Didnt most of us figure wed be back to business as usual by mid to late June?
But June turned to July and now were seeing record case numberson a daily basis.
August looks to bebrutal.
Other nations with advanced AI programs arent necessarily fairing much better.
Its bad news all the way down.
Figuring out why requires a combination of retrospect and patience.
But we can certainly see where AI hype is currently leading us astray.
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This is an example of the disconnect between AI devs and general reality.
Worse, the more infections you havethe less reliable contact-tracing becomes.
Modeling
The next big area where AI was supposed to help was in modeling.
Unfortunately modeling a pandemic isnt an exact science.
That means our models started with guesses and were subsequently trained on up-to-date data from the unfolding pandemic.
In other words: our AI models havent proven much better than our best guesses.
Up to80 percentof COVID-19 carriers are asymptomatic and a mere fraction of all possible carriers have been tested.
Testing
What about testing?
Didnt AI make testing easier?
Kind of but not really.
Sure theres some targeted solutions from the ML community helping frontline professionals deal with the pandemic.
Were not taking anything away from the thousands of developers working hard to solve problems.
But, realistically, AI isnt providing game-changer solutions that face up against major pandemic problems.
Its making sure truck drivers know which supplies to deliver first.
Its helping nurses autocorrect their emails.
Its working traffic lights in some cities, which helps with getting ambulances and emergency responders around.
And its even making pandemic life easier for regular folks too.
The cure
AI is useful during the pandemic, but its not out there finding the vaccine.
Scientists and researchers almost always tout chemical discovery as one of the hard problems that quantum computers can solve.
But nobody knows when.
What we do know is that today, in 2020, humans are stillpainstakingly building a vaccine.
When its finished itll be squishy meatbags who get the credit, not quantum robots.
In times of peace, every new weapon looks like the end-all-be-all solution until you test it.
We havent had many giant global emergencies to test our modern AI on.
At the end of the day, most of our pandemic problems are human problems.
This isnt something AI can directly help us with.
But that doesnt mean AI isnt important.
