Bill Gates has some thoughts on artificial intelligence and how it will affect lives in the near future. He's making some bold predictions, but there are a number of problems with those predictions; for a tech guy, he seems awfully fuzzy on the limits of any machine intelligence, and he seems woefully unaware of the complexities of biology. That's significant because he's predicting that AI will one day replace teachers and doctors.

Bill Gates predicted that advancements in artificial intelligence will significantly reduce humanity’s role in many traditional tasks such as medicine and education — and the seismic shift could happen in less than 10 years.

During a recent interview with comedian Jimmy Fallon on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” the Microsoft co-founder described a future where humans are no longer necessary “for most things” because AI technology will readily perform tasks that currently require specialized human skills.

Today, expertise in fields such as medicine and education remains “rare,” Gates said, adding that those areas depend on “a great doctor” or “a great teacher.”

But over the next decade, “great medical advice [and] great tutoring” will become free and commonplace, Gates said.

AI will, no doubt, become an increasingly valuable tool for a wide variety of professions, education and medicine among them. But they should never be more than tools, as any machine lacks human traits that are essential in education and, especially, medicine.

First, education: There are places in which technology could be used to make education more efficient and, indeed, to vastly improve it; one lecturer who is brilliant in a specific field, like mathematics, history, or business, could host an online lecture to thousands. But there are times and subjects where this just won't do. Vocational training, for example, requires hands-on experience, and in that, there is no substitute for a hands-on instructor with knowledge of the topic, be it welding or agriculture. 

More to the point, there are times when there is no substitute for a human teacher who can recognize verbal and non-verbal feedback from his or her students and react accordingly. That's something that AI, I suspect, is decades away from - if it ever reaches that level.

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And then, medicine: Again, AI can be a tool but must never be more than that. The delivery of medical care requires some knowledge of biology, as well as some elementary psychology, along with the technical aspects of care delivery. Biology is unlike some of the sciences; it's not like engineering, where things can be measured down to thousandths of an inch with great consistency, or mathematics, where numbers remain immutable no matter how or where applied. Biology is fuzzy, with few, if any, sharp edges. Humans are inconsistent; our reactions to pain and discomfort differ from person to person. Some feel pain more keenly than others, some won't admit to any discomfort, and some will fake discomfort for one reason or another, such as to scam a credulous doctor out of prescription drugs.

No AI, at least at present, can sense these things; a machine intelligence is not capable of intuition. And when dealing with humans, in education, in medicine, in any number of disciplines, it's not rote knowledge that is valuable; it's not the memorization of facts that makes for, as Bill Gates puts it, a brilliant educator or physician. No, it is intuition, that purely human property, that makes for a great teacher or practitioner.

Bill Gates doesn't seem to understand that. But I'm willing to bet most healthcare providers do.

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