Overall, the AI was more accurate and consistent in its decision making, with major errors only occurring 6 percent of the time. The team has now moved on to testing the AI out on human embryos to see if its success can be replicated.
According to the team behind the study, physical fatigue, different educational backgrounds, and emotional stress all contribute towards the human experts’ lower accuracy – things that the AI would never be disadvantaged by.
Far from putting the embryologists out of a job, however, the team see this AI as a way to augment their practices.
“The artificial intelligence system must be based on learning from a human being – that is, the experienced embryologists who set the standards of assessment to train the system,” lead investigator Professor José Celso Rocha, from São Paulo State University, said in a statement.
The rise of AI in the last few years has been nothing less than stellar, and already, its ability to trounce humans when it comes to pattern recognition has led to it being used in a wide range of settings, from the military to health services. Certain cities around the world are already trialing the use of an AI to make diagnoses, which is designed to compliment the abilities of a human clinical practitioner.
This new study is yet another confirmation that an AI-led future is far closer to the present than we think: man and machine, working hand in hand, to prolong the human species.