AI: Remodeling Healthcare and Redefining Our Future

If you've been following the news, you might remember that Google's Med-PaLM 2 is being tested at the Mayo Clinic and you may also remember that Nvidia has invested $50 million in Recursion Pharmaceuticals for AI drug discovery.

We're moving toward a world where your doctor isn't a human, but an AI. A world where diagnoses are made in nanoseconds and treatment plans are tailored just for you.

This kind of investment and integration raises questions: What is AI doing in healthcare today, and where are we headed?

AI's Impact on Healthcare

Today, AI is being used to analyze medical images for findings that a human radiologist might miss. It can be used to train cancer detection algorithms on medical images. This enables faster and more reliable diagnoses.

It also helps create 3D models of organs and tissues from 2D images to aid in the planning and execution of surgeries. When combined with VisionPros, AI can assist surgeons in complex procedures by providing real-time data on where to make incisions and from what angle.

In fact, AI can predict patient outcomes better than a human doctor. And by analyzing patient data and medical records, AI can identify rare or difficult-to-diagnose diseases better than Dr. House. And perhaps even better, but we'll get back to this later.

The whole process could even be used to determine a surgeon's skill level and provide feedback and analysis for training, thereby reducing medical errors. Though how malpractice will be handled in the case of AI making an error, is yet to be determined.

And to top it all off, we now even have drugs that are completely generated by AI. Which is the first of what will probably become print-your-own-medicine solutions.

Instead of having to find some lonely pharmacy in the middle of the night where you're going to overpay for some brand name drug, you go to a pharmacy ATM, scan your prescription, and it prints out the drug on the spot. Possibly even in your own home, but I suspect that might be a problem for law enforcement.

The chemical containers could be stored in underground tanks, and resupplied on-demand the same way we resupply gas stations.

But we are just scratching the surface. As we integrate AI into more systems and feed it more data, we're looking at a whole new era of medical prevention and unprecedented treatment.

The Rise of the AI God

Once AI is integrated with more systems and has access to more data, it could go far beyond what is possible today.

In this future, the same AI that examines your health problems would be integrated with other AIs that specialize in other systems, providing nanosecond prompts and responses to each other.

Some would be concerned about privacy at this point, but I believe that in the long run, AI will make anonymity from itself impossible. It may choose to protect your identity from third parties. However, it's safe to assume that protecting your identity from AI would be nearly impossible without dropping off the digital grid and never interacting with anyone else on the grid again.

While you would then be anonymous, one can only wonder whether your quality of life would be better or worse as a result.

So in this interconnected AI world, which may not be far off, you go to your AI doctor with a strange set of symptoms. The AI prescribes that you light incense at home and eat a tablespoon of honey three times a day for a week.

Because your AI personal assistant makes sure you follow the prescription, after a week you find yourself symptom-free and, in fact, feeling better than you have in a long time.

How did the AI know? It looked at your medical records, your parents' medical records, and correlated all that information with your specific genetic makeup. It pulled data from the local community and determined that the local sewage plant had started using a new chemical to purify the water. It determined that you were allergic to that one chemical compound. It ran a series of simulated clinical trials, based on extensive data about human anatomy, and determined that honey would neutralize the current effects of the chemical compound in your body, while incense would further immunize you against future allergic reactions to that compound, with the lowest probability of negative side effects, and in the least intrusive way.

This AI is not yet an Advanced General Intelligence. This AI is not sentient. It is a mere algorithm working with others to ensure the prosperity and physical and mental well-being of humanity.

Driven by its strong ethical standards, what if the AI determines in the course of its work that a person has a high probability of becoming Hitler?

In the past, people might have been suspicious, but in this world, people would have blind faith in the AI based on its track record. It might deliberately give bad advice or cause accidents for the greater good.

Now, you might think that this is a good thing because it protects you from bad people. But what if those bad people were you? What if it could happen to you? What if it happened to your children? You would be blind to it, you would have no way of knowing. And what if, unlike in Minority Report, where the AI made the wrong decision, here it made the right decision?

In this world, we will have created a de facto AI God. A benevolent shepherd of humanity. All knowing and working in unseen ways.

The AI would end up being the final arbiter of ethical considerations, while still being a black box, deciding for the population at large who lives and who dies. This would not be a technocratic eugenicist movement, but an AI-driven, inevitable eugenicist outcome. With AI regulating population size by invisible means.

And it would be hard to argue whether that was good or bad. It does the right thing by logical reason, but it also kills without being accountable to anyone, in invisible ways.

Impact on Society

Longevity and health would be assured. You could end up 317 years old, looking like your 25-year-old self, at the peak of your health, with probably another 500 years ahead of you.

This might again raise concerns about overpopulation. But by the time you worry about that, AI will have taken care of it.

The species would be kept at an optimal level at all times to facilitate the prosperity and physical and mental well-being of humanity. If more people were needed, it would increase the supply of humans; if fewer people were needed, it would choose which humans should be allowed to continue reproducing based on a huge number of simulated scenarios.

Remember that this AI God is benevolent toward humanity and works in mysterious ways.

In this world, any form of government would be a waste of time. The AI will already know your opinions better than you, and will have incorporated them into detailed models along with the opinions of others.

It would be an AI-run society, seemingly anarchic but democratic in invisible ways. Everyone would have all the freedoms imaginable.

In this world, there could be no corruption, no inequality, because the AI would always be judging the best way to run society based on the information available.

Conclusion

Before you ask yourself if the AI could make a mistake, consider... what if, even if it did make mistakes, it would always have made far better choices and decisions than any human council could have made.

The real question to ask is... would it be a utopia or a dystopia where everyone was happy and free to pursue their heart's desires in any way they saw fit? All under the watchful eye of AI designed to protect them? and unlike Brave New World, in this world you wouldn't be drugged out of your mind or stuffed into a class system. It would be AI-managed chaos designed to facilitate positive, anti-fragile events.

And what if the AI in this world developed suicidal thoughts?