The EconomistJune 9th 2018 Leaders 1312 better recovery. It reduced its budget deficit, cleaned up its
banks and freed its labour market. Thanks to growth that has
exceeded 3% a year since 2015, Spain’s output is now above its
pre-crisis level. Italy, by contrast, has been slow to deal with the
losses at its banks, and its labour-market reforms have been
timid. Its recovery is among the weakest in the euro zone, and
output still languishes below the pre-crisis peak.
Bust and boom
The difference lies in political leadership. In many ways, Mr
Rajoy has served his country well. Taking office in December
2011, in the teeth of the crisis, he administeredtough medicine
consistently. Untilthis month a remarkable political survivor,
he had managed to hold on to power without a parliamentary
majority for two and a half years.
He had his limitations. His pigheadedness meant that he
could not stop the drama in Catalonia from turning into a cri-
sis, culminating in aunilateral declaration of independence
last October. That prompted direct rule from Madrid, lifted
only now that the separatists, who wona regional election in
December, have at last agreed on a new government. Above
all, Mr Rajoy could never throw off theshadow of old corrup-
tion scandals in his People’s Party. A court verdict on some of
these triggered the censure motion that destroyedhim.
Yet he leaves Spain inbetter shape than Italy—not justeco-
nomically but politically. Italy’s big problem is that the elector-
ate has lost confidence in mainstream politics. Well over halfthe voters at the election in March chose parties from the polit-
ical extremes. Italy has had no equivalent of France’s presi-
dent, Emmanuel Macron, to reconstitute the splintered centre.
In Spain, too, established parties have suffered at the hands
of insurgents. One new lot, Podemos, is anti-capitalist and left-
wing (it wants to scrap the labour reforms, among other
things), but it has struggled to reach 20% in polls. By contrast,
the other newcomer, Ciudadanos,is broadly liberal and some-
what technocratic. It belongs to the centre and has become its
country’s most popular party. Crucially, Spain has no signifi-
cant movement on the nationalist right, unlike Italy, France
and many others, including Poland and Hungary. Indeed, tol-
erance of refugees and migrants has been an impressive fea-
ture of Spanish democracy.
Difficulties lie ahead. Unemployment, and the debt stock,
are still too high. The Catalan crisis continues to fester. But Mr
Sánchez promises to maintain both the old government’s bud-
get and, it seems, its labour reform. He also looks a better bet
than the stubborn Mr Rajoy to explore political solutions in
Catalonia. In due course, these may require new constitution-
al changes. Progress will not be easy, and Mr Sánchez may not
get far before his weak parliamentary position derails him. But
Spain’s politics look more stable than Italy’s, with its fading
mainstream parties and the pantomime-horse of populists in
government. Hard reform and economic recovery have pre-
vented greater political instability. For that, at least, Spaniards
owemuchas graciasto dour Mr Rajoy. 7R
ADIOLOGISTS, say the pes-
simists, will be first against
the wall when the machines
take over. Analysing medical
images is a natural fit for “deep
learning”, an artificial-intelli-
gence (AI) technique which first
attracted attention for its ability
to teach computers to recognise objects in pictures. A variety
of companies hope that bringingAIinto the clinic will make
diagnosis faster and cheaper. The machines may even be able
to see nuances that humans cannot, assessing how risky a pa-
tient’s cancer is simply by looking at a scan.
Some AIresearchers think that human beings can be dis-
pensed with entirely. “It’s quite obvious that we should stop
training radiologists,” said Geoffrey Hinton, an AIluminary, in- In November Andrew Ng, another superstar researcher,
when discussingAI’s ability to diagnose pneumonia from
chestX-rays, wondered whether“radiologists should be wor-
ried about their jobs”. Given how widely applicable machine
learning seems to be, such pronouncements are bound to
alarm white-collar workers, from engineers to lawyers.
In fact the application ofAIto medicine suggests that the
story is more complicated. Machine learning will indeed
change many fields, allowing the rapid analysis of enormous
piles of data to uncover insights that people might overlook.
But it is not about to make humans redundant. And radiology,
the very field that is used as a cautionary tale about the robo-
pocalypse, shows why.
One is the nature ofAIitself. The field is suffused with hype.
Some papers show artificial radiologists outperforming the
ones in white coats (see Science section). Others, though, still
put the humans ahead. The machines may eventually take an
unambiguous lead. But it is important to remember that AI, for
the foreseeable future, will remain “narrow”, not general. No
human is as good at mental arithmetic as a $10 pocket calcula-
tor, but that is all the calculator can do. Deep learning is broad-
er. It is a pattern-recognition technique, and patterns are every-
where in nature. But in the end it, too, is limited—a sort of
electronic idiot-savant which excels at one particular mental
task but is baffled by others. Instead of wondering whether AI
can replace a job, it is better to ponder whether it could replace
humans at a specific task.The human touch
That leads to a second reason for optimism: the nature of work.
Most jobs involve many tasks, even if that is not always obvi-
ous to outsiders. Spreadsheets have yet to send the accoun-
tants to the dole queue, because there is more to accountancy
than making columns of figures add up. Radiologists analyse a
lot of images. But they also decide which images should be tak-
en, confer on tricky diagnoses, discuss treatment plans with
their patients, translate the conclusions of the research litera-
ture into the messy business of real-life practice, and so on.AI, radiology and the future of workImages aren’teverything
Clever machines will make workers more productive more often than they will replace them