Moneyball Medicine

In this week's show Harry interviews Rayid Ghani, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies how to use AI and data science to model and influence people's behavior in realms like politics, healthcare, education, and criminal justice.Ghani tell Harry he grew up hating coding, since the very need for it showed that "computers are really stupid and dumb." But Ghani says he eventually realized that machine learning can change that by allowing programmers to teach computers the rules of the game, at which point they can improve on their own and learn to solve real problems.Ghani went on to become chief data scientist for the 2012 Obama campaign, and he has since used what he learned  about data analytics to study applications of AI to large-scale social problems in many areas, including healthcare. He's currently Distinguished Career Professor in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.In political campaigns, Ghani says, machine learning and o