No18 has a knack of snatching foul-up from the jaws of success.
What should have been a great week for him, with clear, new announcements, ended in a salmagundi of rowing-back, rows and 'really?'
No18 and his press people, would do well to remember the days of Poldark communication, when it took three weeks for a rich man to get a letter to Cornwall, are gone. Now, it takes three minutes for all of us to get to the facts.
The new capital for development turned out to be old money, owed to the Trusts, from their own savings.
The 'fix' for the pensions debacle overlooked managers and nurses, who want to know why their predicament is any less urgent.
And the latest; £250m, to invest in artificial intelligence (on top of the £billion he already promised, elsewhere)... when there's no such thing.
Don't take my word for it, listen to Rashik Parmar, a Fellow of IBM, the leader of IBM's European technical community and an IBM Distinguished Engineer.
He was previously President of IBM's Academy of Technology and has spent his whole career immersed in technology and artificial intelligence.
... there is no such thing as 'artificial intelligence'... not yet and not in the foreseeable, that we can use to improve healthcare.
Intelligent and artificial... you don't need a big brain to figure it out. It's a snake-oil phrase and we need to be super-careful who we give our money to and figure out what we are going to get for it and when.
Artificial intelligence... we're not even close. So, all the promises you may hear about how AI is going to revolutionise healthcare... is snake oil.
It's a snake-oil phrase and if I had it in my power, I'd ban it for 20 years.
Automated learning... machine learning... makes sense and we can do it, now.
You and I, know what we know and more importantly, we know what we need to go and find out.
Machines digest the people's data we feed them along with our prejudices, preconceptions and predilections.
They swallow it all and regurgitate facts, analysis, history and take a stab at the future.
They can make predictions. It doesn't make them intelligent.
We are in the foothill of the dark world of mathematics, that's all. Cars cannot drive themselves, they simply avoid the things we programme them to look out for.
If you are smart enough to stand at the roadside, holding a stop sign, the Google car is dumb enough to do just that. Stop...
Intelligence implies wisdom, sagacity and understanding. Astuteness and insight.
Machines can remember, but they can't, yet, learn. They can accumulate knowledge, but not educate themselves. Machines need rules. We call them algorithms.
Blue and yellow gives you green. Mix more of one than the other and you have Eau-de-Nile or the colour of a summer leaf on a Willow tree. I know this from experience. Dulux machines in B&Q call it a data-base.
Machines can remember a thousand, maybe ten thousand, or a million images of cancer. Show it a new picture and it will flick through it's data, find a comparison and ask you... 'Is this a cancer... I think it is'.
All this is possible now. No snake oil required.
That's the point. We can do this stuff right now without making it seem like magic or hocus-pocus or more £millions.
Intelligence? We have friends... some are super-bright some are not-so, but they are super-friends. Some, beat you at chess. Some can make a Yorkshire Pudding rise six inches, some know the way to the train station... some will remember your birthday.
Machines can do all of that, and much more. We need no huge investment to do it. We need investment in management, training and organisation and to make it work for us, sort out data permissions, GDPR, interoperability,
Caldecott and public attitudes
.
Over egging the capital money, overlooking good people's pension situation, over claiming for technology... we don't want over the top.
We want to hear; 'we're releasing the capital money, to make it work hard...'
We want to hear; 'we're sorting the pension tax issue, for all our hard working colleagues'.
We want to hear; 'we know the technology we have now can do really useful stuff, and we're to going make it work for us'.
We don't want the hype, extravagance or the hyperbole.
We want to hear; the practical, the useful and the realistic.
Let's hope No18 has a better week, next week.
Have a good weekend.
