Melbourne: Last week, two big names in the artificial intelligence (AI) and Wellness industries announced a collaboration to develop a “hyper-personalized and personalized system.” Health coach with artificial intelligence which will be available as a mobile app” to “reverse trend lines in chronic diseases“. Sam Altman (director of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT) and Arianna Huffington (former media executive who runs a high-tech wellness company called Thrive Global) announced their new company, Health with artificial intelligence Thrivein a Time magazine advertorial.
Healthcare is an attractive direction for an artificial intelligence industry that has promised to transform civilization, but whose tremendous growth in recent years is beginning to look like it has stalled. Companies and investors have poured billions into the technology, but it often remains a solution in search of a problem.
Meanwhile, venture capitalists Sequoia and investment bank Goldman Sachs are wondering aloud whether enough income and consumer demand will ever emerge to make this bubble appear more robust.
Enter the next big thing: AI that will change our behavior, for our own good.
Personalized nudges and real-time recommendations
Altman and Huffington say Thrive AI Health will use the “best peer-reviewed science” and users’ “personal biometric, lab, and other medical data” to “learn their preferences and patterns across the five behaviors” that are key to improving health and treating chronic disease: sleep, eating, movement, stress management, and social connection.
Whether you’re “a busy professional with diabetes” or someone without “access to trainers, chefs, and life coaches” (the only two user profiles they mention), health coach Thrive AI Health aims to use behavioral data to create “personalized nudges and real-time recommendations” to change your daily habits.
In the near future, everyone will supposedly have access to the “life-saving benefits” of a mobile app that tells you – in very specific terms – what you should do to get more sleep, eat better, exercise regularly, be less stressed, and go out and play with your friends. These “superhuman” technologies, combined with the “superpowers” of incentives, will change the world by changing our “small daily acts.”
Despite claims that AI has unlocked yet another innovation, when I read Altman and Huffington’s announcement I was overcome with a sense of déjà vu.
Surely it manages your life
Why does Thrive AI Health and the logic behind it sound so familiar to me? Because it’s a type of thinking we’re seeing more and more in the insurance industry.
In fact, in an article published last year I suggested that we could soon see “whole life insurance” combined with a “personalized AI-powered life coach,” who would combine data from various sources in our daily lives to tell us how to behave in healthier and less risky ways. Of course, it would take notes and inform our insurers and doctors when we don’t follow these recommendations.
In a related paper, my colleagues Kelly Lewis and Zofia Bednarz and I take a deep look at the behavioral risk theories that might drive such products. An insurance model based on managing people’s lives through digital technology It’s on top.
We look at a company called Vitality, which creates behaviour change platforms for health and life insurance. Vitality defines itself as an “active life partner with […] clients”, using specific interventions to improve client well-being and their own outcomes.
Similar projects in the past have had questionable results. A 2019 World Health Organization report on digital health intervention said: Enthusiasm for digital health has also driven a proliferation of short-lived implementations and an overwhelming diversity of digital tools, with limited understanding of their impact on health systems and people’s well-being.
Hyperpersonalization
Altman and Huffington say that the “hyperpersonalization” enabled by AI means this time will be different. Are they right? I don’t think so.
The first problem is that there is no guarantee that AI will work as promised. There is no reason to think that it will not be affected by the problems of bias, hallucinations and errors that we see in cutting-edge AI models like ChatGPT.
However, even if it did, it would still miss the point because the idea of hyperpersonalization is based on a flawed theory about how change happens.
An individualized “AI health coach” is one way to address widespread chronic diseases. health problems Only if you imagine a world where there is no society, but individuals making decisions. Those decisions become habits. Those habits, over time, create problems. Those problems can be eradicated if individuals make better decisions. Those better decisions come from an AI gatekeeper who nudges you in the right direction.
And why, according to this view, do people make bad decisions? Maybe, like middle-class professionals, they are too busy and need to be reminded to eat a salad and stretch out in the sun during their 12-hour workday.
Or, from the AI health coach’s perspective, perhaps, like disadvantaged people, they make bad decisions out of ignorance. They need to be informed that eating fast food is wrong and that they should cook a healthy meal at home instead.
He Social determinants of healthcare applications
But individual lifestyle choices aren’t everything. In fact, the “social determinants of health” may be much more important. These are the social conditions that determine a person’s access to health care, quality food, leisure time and everything else needed to live a good life.
Technologies like Thrive AI Health are not interested in fundamental social conditions. Their “personalization” is a myopic view that stops at the individual.
The only place where society comes into Altman and Huffington’s vision is as something that must help their product succeed: policymakers must create a regulatory environment that fosters AI innovation. […] Healthcare providers need to integrate AI into their practices […] And people need to be fully empowered through AI coaching to better manage their daily health. […]
What if we don’t modify society to fit AI models? We’ll presumably have only ourselves to blame. (The Conversation) NSA NSA
