Inside a book capturing the Inuit’s disappearing way of life, and more |
| How AI will revolutionize health care | | The November issue of Maclean’s, which features essays on how every sector of Canadian life will be altered by artificial intelligence, left me with one essential takeaway: AI is a tool which, like any other, can be used for good or for evil, depending on the user’s intentions. When bad actors want to spread misinformation, AI can turbocharge that effort. When well-meaning engineers team up with social scientists to create a device to help elderly people feel less lonely, AI can provide a robot companion. AI itself is neither good nor bad. It all depends on who uses it and why. One of the most exciting ways we’ll see AI enter our society, to the great benefit of Canadians, will be in powering up certain aspects of our depleted health-care system. Roxana Sultan, the chief data officer at the Vector Institute, writes convincingly about the ways AI is already making hospitals run better. She and her colleagues collaborated with St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto to implement an AI model that determines which inpatients are most at risk of escalating to the ICU or dying, based on metrics like age, biological sex and vital-sign measurements. The hospital implemented this algorithm in 2020, and it reduced ICU escalation and death by more than 20 per cent. The staff report that it has relieved stress and workload, helping them focus on their patients. Sultan also has high hopes for how AI can help researchers determine treatments for patients with uncommon health conditions. She’s advocating for a privacy-safe way to compile data, across many hospitals, to have machines analyze specific patterns for rare diseases in subsets of the population. “The beauty of AI,” she explains in her essay, “is that we will be able to work with massive amounts of historical data from all types of people, which could open the door to more precise treatment of patients based on things like age, genetics and even socioeconomic status.” —Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief | | | | |
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| | | BOOKS | | This mid-century photographer captured the Inuit’s disappearing way of life | | Between 1946 and 1953, photojournalist Richard Harrington went on several expeditions to the Canadian Arctic. Sled dogs hauled him to the shores of Hudson Bay and through much of present-day Nunavut, covering some 5,600 kilometres. A new book features the countless black-and-white photos he took of snow structures and austere landscapes, hunters and smiling families, all in an effort to document the everyday lives of Inuit communities. | | |
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| | | REAL ESTATE | | A Toronto lawyer quit his job to refurbish this Nova Scotia inn | | Avram Spatz used to spend summer holidays at the Evangeline Inn, a five-acre property in the Annapolis Valley that opened in the early 1950s. In 2021, he quit his high-pressure job at a litigation firm in Toronto and, soon after, bought and refurbished the inn. Now, he’s settling into the life of an innkeeper. “When I worked as a lawyer, I always wanted to interact more directly with people and the community,” he says. “The Evangeline is a fun place to be, and it’s growing. Just being part of that fabric is special.” | | |
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