Transcript for:
Harnessing AI for a Better World

what I would like to do for the next few minutes is talk about how we are using harnessing AI to create a better world and I want to both educate and challenge your thinking and so there's no question that most of you in the room abson students know this graphic very very deep for those of you who don't this is United Nations sustainable development goals in 2015 the UN defined these 17 themes each one denoted by a block with the intention that by the end of 20130 the underlying 169 Parts would be achieved the cold hard truth is that we are nowhere close Noel laus and other experts will tell us that the earliest we're going to achieve some of his BS is in 2080 and others at this point are not attainable and I think it's not too hard to disagree with me to say that is just not acceptable we do not want to live in a world where we are not making progress against these critical sustainable gos and so as someone who has spent an entire career bringing Frontier Innovations to the world to solve what were considered to be very challenging problems I believe we have the opportunity to reconsider and reframe our approach do this come to reframe our approach so that we can begin to make progress and so what I'd like to do for our time together is talk about how we are accomplishing incredibly difficult challenges through the lens of only one of these 17 SGS okay and that one happens to be Healthcare and I chose that one because I thought it might be the most universally appreciated of all of the 17 because we're all concerned about our health now I didn't choose healthare because it is a land Health Care system is in deep crisis some really critical facts understand we are seeing a dramatically aging population in glob one in every eight people on the planet are medically equal peace the the mental health challenges that permeate the world today are growing last year 50,000 Americans a record committed suicide all of these different challenges are putting a lot of burden on the Health Care System but unfortunately our health care providers today are suffering from burnout and anxiety at record levels and as a result of that they are leaving the profession so the irony is we need more healthcare workers but yet what the World Health Organization tells us is we will be at least 10 million healthcare workers short by the end of this decade and that's just not acceptable and of course the costs continue to spiral out of control and so we have now at our disposal for the first time which is accessible to all of us a multipurpose platform that I'd liken to a Swiss army knife on steroids and that in fact is something that has a limitless number of tools that can solve problems that we could never solve before at rate of speed that were unimaginable now I recognize and the media has done a brilliant job of putting a lot of fear into many people's hearts about the downside of AI and I think it's important to understand that a lot of this is just overblown but more importantly I want to share with you an immutable truth and that is no technology is inherently good or bad technology is only as good as the values in intentions of the people who deploy it and it is with those values and intentions that we will collectively create our future together so let us leave it to the policy makers and The Regulators to manage the downside risks of AI and leave it to us the leaders who care about living in a better world to harness AI for good now I want to offer you four specific proof points to demonstrate why I believe this is so powerful and first though why we need to go back to the very center of the healthare system the medical doctor now the medical doctor as you can see in this image is under incredible stress a lot of these doctors who are leaving the profession and I've had many in my MBA classrooms have said Professor Mike you know I spend one hour in the operating room and 4 hours doing paperwork I'm a cog in the healthcare industrial complex and I do not feel like I am doing what I wanted to do and so what we see here is someone who is they're they're spending too much time doing battle with insurance companies around compliance and one of the unintended consequences of the mass adoption of electronic medical records is that doctors have become notet takers they spend on average 4 hours every single day and entering notes into these health records it's crazy so when a doctor receives their degree and they're ready to practice they take the Hippocratic oath and the Hippocratic Oath is first Do no harm but unfortunately burned out doctors are doing harm of course not intentional harm but we see 800,000 Americans die every single year from medical errors another 4,000 from surgical errors and this just cannot continue so how do we ease the pain of these clinicians so they can in turn ease our pain and I very much believe and I hope that the next few examples will prove that bringing an AI enabled physicians's assistant to the clinical team will be very very powerful and so I'm not saying that we're going to Forfeit Medical Care to an AI bot that's not at all what I'm saying but there are many many examples and I'm only going to get to scratch the surface in this short talk about how we're using AI to remove the administrative burden in the cognitive burden on doctors and at the same time a lot of very early promise about how AI is leading to a much more bical better clinical outcome so what you see here is something that I know some of you in this room have experienced now for most of us when you think about a consultation with the doctor right it's like a driveby okay they're racing from appointment to appointment and more often than not they're sitting at a bench and they're typing but they're looking into a computer screen they're looking at your record and they're looking over their shoulder at you every you know 15 30 seconds to keep you engaged well what we have now is an AI enabled medical scribe an ambient scribe and what happens is that the doctor is now in consultation with the patient that disc question is being recorded that video file is being translated into a text file that text file is being uploaded into the electronical electronic medical record of the patient and then you can print a summary of that discussion and hand it to the patient as they leave the room okay this is saving medical professionals 20 plus hours a week so the early feedback from doctors is extremely positive imagine what you can do with 20 extra hours a week in your life and so what we're seeing is doctors now have more time to provide a higher quality of care to patients more time to keep up with their medical journals and oh yeah go home and recuperate and rejuvenate so that you can manage that systemic challenge which is burnout so that's proof Point number one we have paid a lot of lip service in this country to preventative care but that's not how we roll in America okay the way we roll is someone becomes symptomatic and you go see a doctor about a challenge that you're facing hopefully with enough time to alleviate that problem now we're starting to see AI enabled solutions that can predict well in advance of significant illnesses and diseases and so one of them comes from a company called lcome Technologies working very closely with the Mayo Clinic and there and this one is focused on Diabetes 40% of Americans have pre-diabetes 80% don't know it diabetes costs the US Health Care System a half a trillion dollar a year that's with a tea okay and of course people with diabetes live lives with a lot of challenges and so it turns out diabetes is hiding in plain sight and these algorithms are able to detect from your medical record whether you are actually on track to have diabetes and the physician can then do an intervention and put you on an appropriate medical regime to ensure that you don't cross that threshold making countless lives far more pleasant to live and saving the healthare system massive amounts of money the third proof point is around accuracy of detection one of the things that I want to share with the audience especially with the younger ones in the room and this is to educate but not to scare people the number of incidences of cancer amongst people in the age cohort from 19 to 49 is rising dramatically especially instances of gastrointestinal Cancers and many of you I'm sure saw on the news yesterday that Princess Kate the Princess of Wales reported that she has cancer right and this was after a very severe abdominal surgery and so it's very likely it's it's a gastrointestinal cancer and so what you find is that when you go for a procedure like a colonoscopy right doctors are looking for polyps they're looking for abnormalities and I ideally they identify them all but they never do because they look for them by visual inspection and some are missed and if that is a precancerous or a malignant poop it will spread very rapidly and create havoc and so new AI enabled Technologies are reducing dramatically the number of Pops or other abnormalities that are missed in cancer detection and my final proof point is around antibiotics what you may or may not know is that we are seeing today 1 and a half million people die every year from antibiotic resistant superbugs so a superbug is a pathogen that pathogen could be a virus or bacteria that has grown so strongly that it no longer is effectively managed by an antibiotic and so the World Health Organization tells us that we're on a course to see 10 million people die every year 10 million people from these super BS and so here's a great case study just up the road at MIT you see doctor Jim Collins the father of synthetic biology who has been fighting the good fight in his lab for decades on trying to find new compounds that are effective against these these superbugs the Golden Age of antibiotic Discovery happened in the 1940s 50s and 60s we're talking 60 to 80 years years ago that's a long time he decides to collaborate with Dr Regina arali who was an AI specialist in bi medicine and here's where the magic you believe in magic here's some magic okay they wound up procuring a library of 110 million chemical compounds it would have been impossible for them to analiz these 110 million compounds using the old techniques but using a neural Network in deep learning they were able to identify an effective compound in three days not three weeks not three months not three years in three days okay if that's not magic I don't know what is okay and we're just getting started so let's now come full circle to these sustainable development goals okay I think I made my case that a current course in speed we will fail spectacularly we cannot afford to wait a half a century every year that passes the problems the challenges the crises become more complex and more severe and the consequences become far more Unthinkable and so the question then I ask all of you is how do we meet the moment how do we rise to the occasion what is it going to take for us to knock down these critical goals in some reasonable amount of time and I think you know that my answer lies that at least part of it and I'm not saying all of it but part of it lies in embracing the power of AI now I have lived in the tech industry I've spent a lot of time in silan Valley and here in Boston and other tech centers right what you need to know whether you know this or not today we are living in the era of AI today and I realize some of you may not understand that some of you may even you know be very skeptical but what I want you to understand is the the number of Degrees of Separation from this AI re ution epicenter you are the less you may realize it today but as sure as I'm standing here I need you to go home and understand this it's going to happen faster than you can imagine and you want to be on the right side of this transformation okay and so what what would I like you to then take away from this discussion first of all it's all handson deck for the planet and as I look into the audience and so many students right this generation of students is the most environmentally and socially conscious since the 1960s and you get it but for those of you who show up on a Saturday at a tedx event on a day that feels like it's a monsoon day in Boston we know that you all care about making the world a better place and so what can you do I would ask you to think about picking one of these 17 themes one that you resonate with one that makes your heartbeat faster and say this is where I want to contribute okay this is where I think I can make a difference because let's be honest the government or the United Nations is incapable of helping us with this our US government can barely get from week to week without a shutdown crisis okay much less address some of these critical goals so if you can think about that goal that makes you excited do some research figure out where and how you can contribute I think that would be an incredible outcome but don't do it with your hands tied behind your back so as I travel the world today teaching and lecturing and you know doing all the things I do around AI I have noticed this huge knowing doing Gap a lot of people have heard of generative AI they know it's there but most of them are not really rolling up their sleeves and using these tools okay why I think it's probably very intimidating but let's be clear you don't have to be an AI specialist you don't have to be a machine learning engineer you don't have to be a data scientist if you can speak or type you can make these tools work for you they're as intuitive and as accessible and as affordable as any tools with this level of power and capability that I have ever seen okay so let me talk about Singapore for a second Singapore is a remarkable country that punches way above its weight they have had a national AI policy in place since 2019 and they've already updated it and one of the components of that policy is they are funding organizations and people to level up their skills in self-reliant America that is not going to happen okay it is up to us so what is on the other side of investing in your learning a much higher level of productivity a much higher quality of work the ability to eliminate tedious tasks and just like the doctor saving 20 hours of time a week saving time for other things in your life so what will you do with that extra time family of course taking care of your health of course learning an instrument or a new language but I also hope that you will take some of that time once you get to the other side and you will dedicate it to making the planet a better place carp DM [Applause]