In Japan’s first reported case of artificial intelligence saving someone’s life, an AI has succeeded where a team of skilled human doctors did not. A woman with a rare type of leukaemia was correctly diagnosed by the AI. Even more remarkable, it took just ten minutes to compare the woman’s genetic information with 20 million clinical oncology studies to arrive at the life-saving diagnosis. Does this mean robots are going to replace our doctors? Not quite, but increasing volumes of medical data, more powerful computers and smarter algorithms could see a future medical science in which human doctors are helped by AI. Data driven medicine taps into the expanding databases of genomic, clinical, imaging (scans and x-rays), and molecular data. Advanced algorithms are put to work that learn from repeated cycles of enquiry, and all of this takes place on affordable computer hardware. We can now sift through billions of records to find answers, taking minutes to do what might take years for humans.