Ethical worries are marring Alphabet’s AI healthcare initiative

Deepmind, the digital brain foundry owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, wants to use artificial intelligence to solve, well, everything. Last year, its software taught itself to play the strategy game Go better than any human on the planet. For its next trick, it wants to move beyond games to a very real-world problem: health care. 

The London company has a fast-growing division – now 100 strong – dedicated to health. And while DeepMind’s research on Go may be years away from yielding practical applications, its health-care work is affecting people’s lives today through projects with the UK's National Health Service. These include a mobile app to alert doctors and nurses to changes in a patient’s condition and efforts to research whether computers can analyse various kinds of medical imagery as well as experienced doctors.