This is a guest opinion column

If the headlines are true, artificial intelligence is either Silicon Valley’s greatest invention or will destroy digital privacy and devastate middle-income jobs.

Fortunately, the extreme headlines are not accurate, but here in Birmingham and across America, AI is being developed and used in ways that should deliver extraordinary results for our economy, our communities, and all Americans.

For example, our young company is using AI and machine learning to accelerate healthcare research, lower the cost of care, and eventually save lives.

Using AI doesn’t feel remarkable. It’s like when we leaped from floppy disks to hard drives, then servers, then cloud storage. Or when personal computer chips’ processing power doubled, then doubled, and doubled again. The result was we went from computers the size of whole rooms to one in every home to one in every pocket.

AI is a fancy term for the special software that enables machines to analyze vastly greater amounts of data much faster than ever before. More data processed faster produces more “intelligence,” or knowledge, that humans can then apply to improve any number of activities – transportation with self-driving cars, smarter mortgage approvals because the bank has more data, and new drug trials that will produce better results, which our team enables.

For our company, AI-driven medical research means using advanced processing power to run previously impossible numbers of calculations on massive anonymized data sets about people, their characteristics, and how they react to a drug being tested. The results of these analyses tell us – and the scientists who manage clinical trials – how to improve testing so we learn more about different levels of effectiveness and different harmful side effects in different populations.

A simple example is if new medicines are tested only on young men, we won’t know if the medicine will work for older men or any women. Multiply the gender and age factor with all the variations of Americans’ differences that might impact medical research – blood types, races, and ethnicities, for starters. We can further calculate whether enough participants have food allergies, different medical histories, or genetic backgrounds.

If our AI-powered trial can use this data effectively, we can make thoughtful choices about when a drug should be approved and for which specific populations it will be most effective – or not. Or – one day in the future – we can produce different versions of medicines that will be prescribed based on an individual patient’s characteristics – personalized medicine like never before!

In some regards, the AI skeptics are absolutely correct. If artificial intelligence is misused by misguided or criminal actors, the results might be devastating. It’s all about the math – the algorithms, or formulas as we called them in high school algebra. If someone writes a mortgage approval algorithm that overweights applicants’ racial backgrounds or ignores off-the-books income, the results could be biased in ways that diminish some communities’ potential for homeownership and long-term financial success. It will be like the pharmaceutical industry’s decades of medical testing that excluded women and people of color from drug trials.

My mother dedicated her life to healthcare and drilled the “do no harm” ethic into me. My military and business experience taught me to appreciate my instincts but trust the data. So every day we focus on helping medical researchers get the best data inputs so their results are improved and new drugs help more people. It’s a simple mission that’s hard to execute, but made much easier with the power of AI.

I hope Congress will consider our mission, our progress, and positive health care opportunities when they consider legislation and regulation about AI.

Del Smith is the CEO and Co-Founder of Acclinate in Birmingham, AL