561 - ROMA 63
chrisryan.substack.com
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Should we be excited or concerned about AI? Is technology learning to mimic us or are we learning to mimic technology? Who’s colonizing whom? I talk about some upcoming interviews I’ve got cooking.
Music: “Brightside of the Sun,” by Basin and Range; “It’s Morning in America,” by Durand Jones and the Indications.
561 - ROMA 63
Thanks Chris, hugely enjoyed this episode. I listened a day after talking at a party with a tech enthusiast who has a background in economics about how AI will impact healthcare (my field).
His perspective was that frequent patient symptoms uploads could be fed through AI and used to identify early disease, with doctors reduced to technicians, scanning, scoping and biopsying on behalf of the computers.
He treated the problem of healthcare as a maths problem, with the goal being early diagnosis and subsequent treatment all done with maximum efficiency (and, inevitably, maximum profit).
Missing from his argument was any consideration of disease prevention which, to my mind, can only be achieved through a fundamental change in the way we live, move and eat and a societal rejection of the chronic stress which is responsible for much of the ‘illness’ I see day to day.
Any integration of AI into healthcare will be led by those with an interest in ‘efficiency’ and profit rather than an a true understanding of what humans need to feel ‘well’ in any true sense and would, I suspect, make an already anti-human system fundamentally worse.
Synchronicity alert. Sometime last week I received an email from either Amazon or Barnes & Nobles announcing some up coming books including Quantum Criminals. I thought this was something right up Dr. Ryan's ally and meant to forward it on . In the meantime, Im listening to ROMA 63 and not only are you aware of it, you are going to be talking to the author. Finally, I finish my walk, head over to the local coffee roasters and what is playing on Sirius in the shop, Donald Fage (i believe The Nightfly).