Kim Solez, MD

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For a year I have taught a course on Technology and the Future of Medicine.

It has caused me to reflect on the meaning of both “Future” and “Medicine”.

The Gibson quote seems to be behind people charged with talking about the future actually talking about the present and hoping you will not notice. Easier to find visuals and text that way.

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Notice how the images and sound bytes in this three minute video from the European Union grab you.

This is how all presentations about the future of medicine should be. They should describe something that does not exist yet, but likely will soon, and provide strong images which capture your imagination and keep you thinking about the subject afterwards.

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1) The technological Singularity.

2) Existential risks, AI, genomics, and nanotech.

3) Ways to optimize a positive outcome for

humanity in the co-evolution of humans and

machines.

4) The influence of these considerations on

medicine of the future.

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The technological singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on. The machines enter into a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted (hence the term "Singularity"). – Ray Kurzweil

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Regulatory oversight that is completely focused on compliance. Discourages risk-taking and innovation.

Health care doesn't have the same financial reward system. Facebook isn't about to pay $1 billion for the latest hot-ticket item in imaging and informatics.

Security always trumps information sharing, and so better, faster linkages are constrained because of security concerns, most of which are bogus.

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HealthAppsNotUsed

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Inside, Outside and the Singularity important concepts we will come back to.

Big Bang Theory (the TV show;16 million viewers) Singularity University (I went to Exec. Program) Singularity Summit (9,000 views per video) Kim Solez – Technology and Future of Medicine

Course LABMP 590 (500 views per video)

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They attempt to surprise the viewer with futuristic stories of the present because it is easy to find good visuals for things that already exist.

The technological Singularity is a very important part of the future of medicine, but until now it has been impossible to describe how it will occur and what it will look like in a convincing way.

This may be the first time you have see a presentation about the Singularity that actually describes it and provides memorable visuals.

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Marcus Hutter suggests that there is an element of human insignificance that makes the whole scenario much more challenging. Also Hutter has created a sort of general AI which makes the problem seem more immediate!

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However Marcus Hutter suggests that there is an element of human insignificance that makes the whole scenario much more challenging. Also Hutter has created a sort of general AI which makes the problem seem more immediate!

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While these are “just” recreational games, they do contain many prototypical elements of the real world, such as food, enemies, friends, space, obstacles, objects, and weapons. Next could be a test in modern virtual worlds... that require intelligent agents, and finally some selected real-world problems..

The same single [AIXI approximation “MC-AIXI-CTW”] is already able to learn to play TicTacToe, Kuhn Poker, and most impressively Pacman (Veness et al. 2011) from scratch.

SingularityCourse

While these are “just” recreational games, they do contain many prototypical elements of the real world, such as food, enemies, friends, space, obstacles, objects, and weapons. Next could be a test in modern virtual worlds... that require intelligent agents, and finally some selected real-world problems..

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Outside the Singularity looking in it will be white noise.

Inside the Singularity if everything speeds up at the same rate we may not notice anything, it may seem like normal life to us.

Even if initially our biological brains count for something in our mental processes, very soon the processing power of the machine implant will vastly outstrip our biological brains. Our biological brains become insignificant regardless of the friendliness or lack thereof of the AI.

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Extreme risk taking because we can back ourselves up from backups if something bad happens.

Insignificance, lack of identity. Why wait to create backups when we have the processing power to run several lives at once. Can replicate ourselves endlessly in seconds! No more waiting 9 months!

The world has little incentive to keep identities straight when biological brains contribute so little to mental processes. Bigger not better.

Aimlessness, lack of sense of purpose.

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The challenge of friendly AI becomes just a small part of a much larger challenge of creating a friendly world in which humans still have lives of significance, human history is retained and extended.

A positive outcome is possible, let’s make it likely. We all need to be engaged in ensuring a positive

outcome for humanity. The future is ours to shape. We need to get busy doing that!

Part of the imagined future could be one where all disease was eliminated but life was intolerable. Another where the only diseases are from bioterrorism.