AI gets a Poor grade of B- in Covid-19 Fight

A look about how AI is helping with vaccine development efforts. Sounds like a reasonable criticism, mainly that the event is too novel to learn from.   But is it that novel, or have we just never seen it in the modern world.   Similar viruses do exit.    Can we learn from it, or does it just not setup a reasonable restarting point for learning. 

Kai-Fu Lee Gives AI a B-Minus Grade in the Covid-19 Fight  in Wired
Robots and computer programs can help with social distancing and food delivery, but have been less helpful in developing a vaccine.

THIS PAST WEEK, as part of the Aspen Ideas Festival, I spoke with Kai-Fu Lee, the president and chair of Sinovation Ventures and a pioneer in artificial intelligence. We discussed his recent argument that AI has been of limited use in the response to the coronavirus crisis. And then we talked about the future of work and why he thinks that Covid-19 is going to accelerate trends toward automation. Because of the virus, and because of the way we all work now, we’re going to have many more robots and other machines in our factories, restaurants, and kitchens. A lightly edited transcript is below. You can watch the original video here.

Nicholas Thompson: You're a pioneer in artificial intelligence. You wrote my favorite book on artificial intelligence. You've taught us all a lot about artificial intelligence. And now we have perhaps the greatest crisis of our lifetime and you've given AI a B-minus in helping to resolve it! Why is that? Why such a low grade?

Kai-Fu Lee: Well, B-minus is a lot better than passing. It's not ideal. The reason is, AI works by accumulating a lot of data and seeing recurrence of similar events in order to make accurate predictions. And a pandemic is a once-a-century activity. There isn't a lot of experience building models and there isn't a lot of data. Despite that, there are many places where AI has added value. So therefore the B-minus.

Can you walk us through the places where artificial intelligence has been helpful in combating the coronavirus and the places where it hasn't done that much?  ... ."