05a Health

Author Wynton Hall reveals in his new book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI that the worship of artificial intelligence as a literal deity is not science fiction. It is already happening, complete with IRS-registered churches, robot priests, and AI confessionals.

CODE RED explains that a former Google AI engineer and self-driving car pioneer named Anthony Levandowski filed paperwork with the IRS in 2017 to register a new church called “Way of the Future.” Its stated doctrine was centered on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” In an interview with Wired, Levandowski described AI in blunt terms: “What is going to be created will effectively be a god. If there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

On January 8th, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Healthcare, a generative AI (GAI) platform designed to be embedded within medical systems platforms and daily workflows. This technology suite is advertised as a solution to clinicians overburdened by administrative work through offloading cognitively taxing tasks, including the choice of diagnostic tests, supporting differential diagnosis, treatment planning, documenting session notes, creating aftercare plans for patients, and generating referral notes and discharge summaries for external providers. In other words, GAI is being implemented at every level of patient care. According to the American Medical Association’s report from their summit on AI, “disruption” of the status quo in healthcare delivery due to GAI technologies “seems inevitable.”

But why does it seem inevitable? An evidenced-based approach to evaluating new technologies would call for careful consideration of benefits and risks for technology implementation on individual use cases — not a rapid systems overhaul. Here, we must recognize that GAI technologies are products — and these products are being actively promoted to healthcare industries and healthcare professionals across the medical space, including in mental health care. Rather than investing billions of dollars into curtailing a failing system of private medical care — which has led to widespread clinician burnout and poor client outcomes — Silicon Valley companies have begun attempting to mud over these fault lines with a quick-drying GAI compound. Even the most well-meaning and justice-oriented clinician is not immune to the tidal wave of billion-dollar marketing strategies bent on creating the illusion of inevitability.

Calls for governments to push “pro-worker AI” sound appealing. The idea is simple: If policymakers deftly guide how the technology develops, they can make sure it helps workers instead of replacing them. What’s not to like?

Here’s your trouble: Technology almost never works that neatly. Its effects on jobs are usually messy, unpredictable, and shaped by millions of decisions from businesses and entrepreneurs—not by a policy plan designed in Washington.

That’s a core point in a recent critique by economist Joshua Gans of a proposal from Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson to steer AI toward worker-friendly uses. Gans says the idea runs into a basic contradiction. The proposal defines “pro-worker” technology as something that makes human capabilities and expertise more valuable. But those things are valuable partly because not everyone has them. If a new technology spreads skills more widely, it may help more workers overall—while at the same time reducing the pay advantage of those who once had rare skills.