Watch where and how you walk – the health care blog

By Mike Magee

In a speech to the philosophical American Society in January 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer said: “We have done something … which suddenly and profoundly changed the nature of the world … We have again raised the question of whether science is good to control it, to help give the world to men, increased incentive, an increase in power.”.

Eight decades later, these words have repercussions, and we are again at a seminal crossroads. Last week, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was everywhere, a remarkably qualified communicator celebrating the fact that his business was now the first company listed on the stock market to exceed an evaluation of 4 dollars.

As he explained, “we have mainly created a new industry for the first time in three hundred years. The last time there was such an industry like this was an electricity production industry … Now we have a new industry that generates intelligence … You can use it to discover new drugs, to accelerate the diagnosis of illness … Everyone will be different in the future. “

Jensen, observed him to play in this morning show, seemed just a little outdated, impressed and perhaps even slightly frightened by the pace of recent change. “We reinvented computing for the first time since the 60’s, since IBM introduced the modern computer architecture… Its Able to accelerate from Computer Graphics to Physics for Science to Digital Biology to Artificial Intelligence…….. Ai is Now Able to Reason, It’s Able to Think… Before it was able to understand, it was able to generate content, but now can reason, it can do research, it can know more about the latest information before answering a question.

Of course, this is not the first time that technology has launched flashing ethical alert fires. I recently summarized the case of facial recognition technology (FRT). The United States has the greatest number of circuit cameras closed at 15.28 per capita, worldwide. On average, each American is taken on a closed circuit camera 238 times a week, but the experts say that it is nothing compared to the place where our “surveillance” society will be in a few years.

The FRT field is on fire.

Emergen Research projects a USD annual investment of nearly $ 14 billion by 2028 with an annual growth rate made up of almost 16%. Detection, analysis and recognition are all potential winners. There are now 277 groups of unique organizational investors offering “breakthroughs” in FRT with an average decade of experience in the back.

But FRT, as incredible and disturbing as it is, took a rear seat last week in the Washington Post article by David Ignace entitled “How the spy game will be working when there is no room to hide”. In the opening sentence, he shares the 2018 warning of a CIA case agent who declares with confidence, that “computer algorithms would soon be able to identify people not only by their faces, or fingerprints, or DNA – but by the unique ways they have worked.”

Speculation with wild eyes? Apparently not. In a scientific publication of Cornell on May 7, 2025, researchers using a model called Farsight were able to confirm the human identity of 1,000 meters thanks to the evaluation of the approach (among other measures) with an accuracy of 83%. For spies that operate in secret and hide their movement and their communications at all costs, there is literally no more “room to hide”.

A moment of reflection is all he should take to appreciate that the distance between a spy blanket And collaborator And our own daily confidentiality and our secret (including health -related information) is indeed close. Consider the former director of the CIA, General David H. Petraeus Words in 2012, “We must rethink our notions of identity and secret. … Each byte left by the grant reveals information on the location, habits and, by extrapolation, intention and probable behavior.”

Thirteen years later, Ignatius asked last week: “We entered a new era where AI models are smarter than human beings. Can they also be better spies? This is the enigma that the creative companies of AI explore. ”

But as no one knows better than the president of Nvidia, the bleeding of AI in human sectors is now almost complete. Even before the recognition of the process, the FRT technology fueled by the AI was omnipresent. They are everywhere – safety, electronic commerce, car licenses, banking services, immigration, airport safety, media, entertainment, traffic cameras – and now health care with diagnostic, therapeutic and logistical applications.

Automatic learning and AI have enabled FTT to move voice recognition, IRIS digitization and fingerprint. And now, “recognition of the process” (the more data monitoring) can theoretically discover the identity of ice agents for the very masked face in one of their raids in the Children park.

Jensen Huang still considers this revolution that is both manageable and progressive. He said last week: “Lots of work will be automated (but), it will create new work, new jobs … AI is the” great equalizer “… because we use AI for research … As a tutor … so that I can be better informed in many different areas than I have become newer because they have a profit because they have a profit of everyone … Best because they had an AI to help them make diagnosis.

Does something keep it at night? And the fact that 80% of undergraduate students in China continue for control? And that, while we are handcuffed in the recruitment of the best spirits abroad by the tariff wars and visa and the targeted attacks against our first universities.

Addressing the Hill & Valley forum in Washington, DC, on May 1, 2025, Huang stressed the importance of maintaining an innovation advance in controlling the risk parameters / advantage of this technological revolution.

His concerns? 1) Already more than 50% of world AI researchers are Chinese. 2) Their algorithms and codes of AI are open source while ours are not transparent and escape a regulatory public / private examination. 3) Our policy seems to be behind and outside synchronized with the technology that is at full speed in advance “.

Mike Magee MD is a regular medical historian of THCB. He is the author of Code Blue: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove / 2020)