The Occasional Perspective - 2/22/23
Opinions and Reflections
What’s Love Got To Do With It? – The American Heart Association’s website on the “heart” carries a substantial amount of information on heart healthy activities, heart-related medical symptoms and the like. In addition, they also recently included a subset of info on what happens when we have the “love” feeling take over our souls. Given that we just passed Valentine’s Day, I thought it might be a useful bit of information for all of us who are working to maintain an emotionally sensitive, aligned and robust attachment to the ones we love. Check it out!
Much Ado About Something – If there’s a consistent “information technology” theme over the last several weeks, it’s that ChatGPT has inextricably changed the environment across the waterfront from healthcare, to finance, to politics, to education to whatever industry you care to discuss!! One of the louder voices on the potential downside of augmented intelligence (AI) over the last couple of weeks came to us from the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. He spoke at a session sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on augmented intelligence (AI). The online discussion covered the waterfront. But, the example he shared that captured my attention was a podcast between Joe Rogan, the ultraconservative podcaster and Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple – which never happened!! Schmidt points out in the podcast that while AI can potentially be a very valuable tool for “good”, it also has the potential for creating “bad” or “erroneous” information that – if not scrutinized – will be digested by a gullible public. Schmidt pointed that: "There are people who will use this for terrible outcomes. We don't have a solution in society for this." In essence, he argues that while the AI toolsets offer some very clear advantages to us in our work, the tools have not yet caught up to the nuance of being human and the policies for managing the tools are way, way behind! Having spent over an hour on the phone with a computer system this past weekend to simply change an airline ticket AND being unable to get a “human” on the line, I think Schmidt is correct. Or, as some may argue, “Houston, I think we have a problem…” By the way, in a separate piece, I learned that ChatGPT passed the US Medical Licensing Exam without the benefit of any assistance from a clinician. Hmmm – robotic doctors on the horizon? – I wonder? Check It Out!!
