Why soft skills will win in the age of machine learning

Back in college, I had a summer job completing research for a clinical health professor. She was a leading expert in diagnosing and treating open human wounds. My job was to survey other experts, get them to examine photos of open wounds, and then recommend a treatment.

A few months ago, I discovered a smartphone app which replaces this work.* You take a photo of an open wound and upload it to the cloud. I suspect that the photo is run through an image recognition model, called a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), that identifies specific features of the wound for treatment. Current machine learning is very good at completing narrowly defined tasks, such as analyzing a specific type of medical image, because they have millions of previous examples to train from. It is not good at handling non-standard cases.