It may be as surprising to you as it was to me, that the field of dentistry has been exploring and researching the value of AI for the last forty years. You probably didn’t know that video calls were available in the 1930s either; and I know you’ll look that up.
Forty years ago, we had CAD-CAM to speed up tooth restoration and replacement. We had dental AI radiology, even before we had mobile phones. Let alone smart ones that are becoming even smarter while we’re lolling about dribbling.
And not even in the dental chair.
Critical thinking used to mean high level, self-guided, self-correcting attempts to reason; using objectivity, evaluation and discernment. In the pursuit of creating, maintaining and nurturing a well-honed process for problem solving and decision-making, it was commonly applied to anything, and everything.
There was no glugging Google like water into an instant noodle cup to puff up some pseudo-intellect.
The majority of communication wasn’t Facebook but actually face-to-face, so bullshit detectors were generally inbuilt and fairly widespread. You didn’t get away with much because someone would call you on it. People weren’t made of sugar and tears then. The accepted protocol was that if you were game enough to try it on, equally, you had to be prepared for the consequences of crapping-on.
Seven billion people now get most of their information from TikTok, all repackaged to fit our shrinking attention spans. Once robust academic legitimacy has become as trustworthy as 5-star health ratings on UPFs, and as fallible as a flat-earther.
(Which, contrary to popular belief, even 13th century serfs didn’t believe. Probably because it was not a time of noetic stagnation; regardless of the lack of electricity and uber eats.)
Oh, how far we have come. And yet, somehow, we haven’t. Some find going to the dentist as daunting as if it were still the 13th century.
Discussing the newly widely accessed internet in a 1999 BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, artistic visionary and cultural icon David Bowie said, “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society—both good and bad— is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”
“It’s just a tool, though, isn’t it?” offered Paxman.
“No it’s not—no. It’s an alien life-form,” says Bowie, half-jokingly.
“It’s simply a different delivery system though,” Paxman argued.
“… I’m talking about the actual context, and the state of content is going to be so different to anything the we can really envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico, it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
Bowie had already pioneered the internet-only release of a song, ‘Telling Lies‘, and launched Bowienet: making him the first artist to become an Internet Service Provider.
This is what comes of being creative, analytical and ever-curious. Curiously—or rather creepily—I noticed only today that “Thinking” appeared on the search engine page as it was loading. It’s been added to my ever-growing pile of Things That Freak Me Out.
Like the necessity for data centres; those dedicated infrastructures for hosting servers, storage, network equipment, cloud computing and AI usage. Within a decade, in New South Wales alone, if all the planned centres are built (which they no doubt will be) the combined power demands will reach at least 4.4gigawatts. All in the western suburbs. Zero, nought, nil on the North Shore, or within coo-ee of Point Piper.
Gee, what a surprise..!
What is it about 4.4 billion watts that doesn’t have people screaming WHAT?! That’s the electricity load of more than 10 million households; along with slurping 112.2 billion litres of water for cooling.
Keep in mind these are simply estimates: we’ve been spectacularly wrong with those, for quite a while.
Imagine the volume of 200 Sydney Harbours, if you can. These are resource demands we really don’t have; even for the pretendies who think climate change is a big clown costume. These water and power needs will be in fierce competition with all agriculture, other industries and people.
PEOPLE, people!!
That’s just one state, in one country. One. To think of it globally is a cheque my pile of Things That Freak Me Out can’t even dig out a pen to write.
It’s hard, this ‘thinking’ thing. It’s critical that we do it though because not doing it seems to have landed us somewhere in the middle of no-one’s exactly sure; because for too many decades most of the thinking was left to people who should not have been thinking what they thought in the first place.
The present, and future solutions for our planet and all that live upon and within it have no definitive, lineal answers. Climate events are not just atmospheric physics and engineering. Medicine is not just chemistry and biology. Science is not the answer to everything the way we like to conveniently think it is. It’s ‘The Jetsons’ idea in the 1960s where technology alone was the answer to working less. Taking into account the economic system in which it’s embedded would have wiped out whole cartoon flavour.
We’re indoctrinated to believe that the key to happiness is money (for the wider freedom and choice it allows). The cold hard truth is that for most of us, the way to get there is by working harder and longer.
Or smarter—which for the most part, appears to mean having many, many people under you all working harder and longer.
Four decades of AI in dentistry does give us freedom from extensive time in the chair, and greater choice in treatments.
Dentists can identify decay in patients up to five years before it appears. It’s also revolutionising the way treatments can be individualised for patients; and helps design entirely new drugs and therapeutics.
At Harvard, cross-disciplinary teams are using AI to analyse satellite data and a multiplicity of other models to reveal communities most impacted by climate events. Fires and heatwaves for instance ultimately cause mouths to be drier, and therefore more prone to oral disease. Psychological distress increases teeth grinding and TMJ disorders. Compounding all this, is the often long-term inability to even see a dentist when weather dictates this type of upheaval.
Empathy, imagination and creativity are not within this abundance of AI solutions. These are all intensely human characteristics; and pivotal to ethical problem solving. We’re at an intersection where prudence absolutely must guide progress. Healthcare cannot have blind faith in AI. I don’t care how complex algorithms become, you can’t engineer trust, confidence and transparency.
Good denists build that. It takes critical thinking. As does keeping your oral health. Make that appointment. If you’re going to be lolling about drooling, it’s a much better look if you’re in their chair.
