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| | | News and views you ought to know about:- Forget about AGI. Worry about artificial superintelligence. The former, artificial general intelligence, denotes the state at which AI can credibly appear to match or exceed the average human in reasoning skills. The latter goes further. It refers to a state of de facto consciousness in which the machine is, for all intents and purposes, intellectually far superior to even the smartest humans. The AI brainiac Mustafa Suleyman, chief of Microsoft’s AI division MAI, is doing two things to see that the Big Tech company takes a lead role in advancing these machines. One, he’s building Microsoft a team of superintelligent AI experts to match the moment with attention to ethical concerns as well as technical know-how. And two, he’s laying out the hopes, fears and aims around which he will rally the subgroup as it goes about its work.
- Suleyman describes his vision in a Microsoft AI blogpost. “We want [the Microsoft Superintelligence Team] to be the world’s best place to research and build AI, bar none,” he writes. “I think about it as humanist superintelligence to clearly indicate this isn’t about some directionless technological goal, an empty challenge, a mountain for its own sake. We are doing this to solve real concrete problems and do it in such a way that it remains grounded and controllable. We are not building an ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence; we are building a practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity.”
- The term Suleyman repeatedly comes back to is humanist superintelligence, or HSI. This he defines as “incredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for, in service of, people and humanity more generally. … AI that is carefully calibrated, contextualized, within limits. We want to both explore and prioritize how the most advanced forms of AI can keep humanity in control while at the same time accelerating our path towards tackling our most pressing global challenges.”
- In fleshing out the humanism at the core of Microsoft AI’s vision for artificial superintelligence, Suleyman paraphrases Albert Einstein: “The concern for man and his destiny must always be the chief interest of all technical effort in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind.” Any technology that doesn’t achieve this, Suleyman writes, is “a failure. And we should reject it.”
- The American Heart Association is out with scientific guidance on the use of AI in clinical care. And the document is concerned with AI in healthcare broadly, not just in heart care. Publishing the work in Circulation, the framers of the guidance state that the AHA is—thanks to its vast human networks and its long-running commitment to evidence-based medicine—“uniquely positioned to advance trusted evaluation and monitoring methods for AI tools.” And that’s just for starters.
- The document, categorized as a science advisory, fleshes out particulars of sound AI adoption under four principles. These are strategic alignment, ethical evaluation, usefulness and effectiveness evaluation, and financial performance. “By grounding evaluation and monitoring in these principles, this science advisory aims to ensure that AI adoption in healthcare is safe, effective, equitable and sustainable, ultimately improving patient outcomes and supporting high-quality AI-enabled care,” the authors write. Meanwhile the four principles “apply across all AI modalities and place patient outcomes and sustainable healthcare at the center of decision-making for clinically effective AI.”
- Can we slow down and think a little harder about AI in healthcare? That’s the plea from the public intellectual Eric Reinhart, a Chicago-based psychiatrist, patient advocate and political commentator. “[W]hen AI is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life,” Reinhart writes in a piece published Nov. 9 by The Guardian. AI is “built to erase silence and isolate the patient as a calculable organism,” he adds. “It cannot recognize that a patient’s first version of their story is often not their real one—not the one that is troubling them most.”
- “Perhaps the most dangerous assumption behind the rise of AI in medicine is that its current trajectory and private ownership structure is inevitable. When we refuse this narrative of inevitability, we can finally recognize that the real alternative to our present is political, not technological,” Reinhart remarks in the left-leaning U.K. newspaper. “It requires investing in the caregiving workforce, strengthening publicly owned systems for both medical and social care, expanding the welfare state to combat growing inequality, and creating conditions for clinicians to care for patients as people, not data.”
- Healthcare AI vendors may need to sacrifice a little moolah for the sake of the mission. Which, of course, is centering the technology on the patient. Former CDC director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, gamely makes the point in an interview with HIMSS Media’s MobiHealth News. “I think there’s plenty of money to be made here, but I think we do have to have a patient-centered approach here—and that may mean that we give up a little bit of margin,” she says. “Ultimately, healthcare is 18% of our GDP, our outcomes are poor in this country compared to other high-income countries, and so if this is about making money, there are plenty of places where money can be made. If this is about improving healthcare, you might make a little less and have a huge impact.” Full Q&A here.
- The Pope has something to say about AI in healthcare. While the technology has the potential to do grave damage to humankind if wielded with malicious intent, it can just as readily be “transformative and beneficial”—as long as its human handlers place it at the true service of the human person. Pope Leo XIV made the remarks at a congress on medical AI Nov. 10. The Chicago-born and -raised 267th Bishop of Rome invited healthcare professionals to employ AI responsibly in their field, so that they may fulfill their “vocation to be guardians and servants of human life,” according to Vatican News. “The fragility of the human condition is often manifest within the field of medicine,” he added. “[W]e must never forget the ontological dignity that belongs to the person as such simply because he or she exists and is willed, created and loved by God.”
- Research news of note:
- From AIin.Healthcare’s sibling outlets:
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