The Human Cost of Precision
In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son died at the age of twenty-six from a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder caused by birth-related brain damage. When in 2017, Nadella delivered a talk about the use of assistive artificial intelligence for people suffering from disabilities like CP, he was contacted by one his colleagues in Spain. Julián Isla, a software engineer at Microsoft, emailed Nadella out of a sense of resonance, because his own son suffered from a rare genetic epilepsy making him a parent of a child living with disability as well. Like Nadella, Isla was also motivated to think of the role of artificial intelligence in the assistance of other parents who, as he described, were on the “odyssey of diagnosis”. (read more...)
