Alphabet

A doctor’s work isn’t all done in examination rooms. Many specialists spend lots of time alone with the lights out, examining photographs that reveal their patients’ internal workings. That might soon change. A paper by Google published in the Journal of the American Medical Association details an algorithm that can detect when someone has developed blindness as a result of diabetes, trained and tested by board-certified ophthalmologists. It shows algorithms can, at least in the case of this particular affliction, make a diagnosis with an accuracy on-par with medical professionals...

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Glucose-monitoring contact lenses for diabetics, wrist computers that read diagnostic nanoparticles injected in the blood stream, implantable devices that modify electrical signals that pass along nerves, medication robots, human augmentation, human brain simulation -- the list goes on. That's not an inventory of improbable CGI effects from the latest sci-fi movie, it's a list of initiatives being tackled by Alphabet's Google Life Sciences research unit, recently rebranded Verily...

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The notable thing about the decision to start working on low-level code—and about all of the team’s decisions—is that it was made on the fly, based on real-time conversations about users’ needs. That’s nothing more than best practices for modern software development, but at the DoD, such agility would normally be impossible. Specifications commonly take years to write and then more years to deliver on before code can even be tested in the field—often making systems obsolete by the time they’re delivered. “The DoD violates pretty much every rule in modern product development,” Schmidt told U.S. Congress recently.

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