Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Risks for Public Health

Artificial Intelligence has been applied in academic research and in inference tasks across the broader economy with demonstrable success, but less so for the core functions of public health, namely protecting and promoting the health of populations.

To date, vision statements on the future of public health3 have focused on the technical possibilities of artificial intelligence and less on how social determinants might influence outcomes achieved by it. Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of processes across an expanded public health continuum4 (table) to make possible personalised predict and prevent approaches, applied differentially across populations to match preventive services to individual need. This approach is potentially a radical expansion in the scope of public health and many of these activities will be led by organisations beyond the established public health institutions.