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Source: Global Times

An article published on July 12 in The Atlantic Monthly, titled: Would you trust your health to artificial intelligence?Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and entrepreneur Arianna Huffington spoke with my colleague Charlie Wortzel about their ambitions to reshape the U.S. healthcare system with generative artificial intelligence (AI). They announced a joint venture, Thrive AI Health, to offer a chatbot that provides behavioral recommendations based on a person’s specific health needs.

The chatbot got it wrong so often that I hesitated to water my tree based on its advice, let alone put anything in my body. But its backers promise that great things are coming. The vision is seductive: As Huffington put it, “Our health care system is broken, and millions of people are suffering because of it.” But some problems may be too big for AI to handle. There’s another way to look at Thrive AI Health: Companies are still trying to figure out what the benefits of AI really are.

Thrive AI Health promises to bring OpenAI's technology to the most private areas of our lives, evaluating health data and making recommendations. Thrive AI Health will improve the existing medical chatbot field, improve people's health, reduce healthcare costs, and significantly reduce the impact of chronic diseases worldwide.

Altman and Huffington described the company as a "critical infrastructure" in the reshaping of the healthcare system. They also said that the company's future chatbot might encourage you to "swap your third afternoon soda for water and lemon." They called the chatbot a "hyper-personalized AI health coach" and the core of Thrive AI Health's pitch. The bot will generate "personalized AI-driven insights" based on the user's biometrics and health data, providing information to help users become healthier. For example, the AI ​​coach might remind a busy diabetic to take medication on time and provide healthy recipes.

This strikes me as hard to swallow: two wealthy, famous entrepreneurs asking ordinary people to hand over their most private, important health data to a nagging robot? Health apps are popular, and people allow tech tools to collect all kinds of personal data every day, such as sleep, heart rate, and sexual health information. If the company succeeds, the market potential is hard to estimate. But AI complicates things, opening the door for companies to train models based on private information. Altman and Huffington are convincing the world that AI will one day be able to change our relationship with our bodies.

Huffington said the difference with AI health coaches is that the technology will be personalized enough to meet individual behavioral change needs, which the current U.S. health system is not able to meet. Altman said he believes people genuinely want technology to make them healthier: "I think there are very few cases where AI can really change the world. Making people healthier is certainly one of them."

Both answers sound sincere, but each requires a certain amount of faith. We need faith, it is a powerful driving force for progress and a way to expand our horizons. However, faith is dangerous in the wrong context, especially blind faith. An industry driven by blind faith seems particularly disturbing, giving huge leverage to the greedy and allowing scammers who want to make a quick buck to extend a "third hand". The biggest trick of an industry based on faith is that it effortlessly keeps changing its goals, resists evaluation, and avoids criticism. People with ulterior motives "paint the pie" to deceive the uninformed. At the same time, immature visions may never wait for redemption. (Authors Damon Berez and Charlie Worzel, translated by Wang Yi)