Your fear of AI isn’t rational, it’s prehistoric
The stream of news, articles, and commentary on AI has not let up for months, and if, like me, you are wondering what it all means to you, you are not alone. You are probably having a hard time deciding on the personal impact and depending but no matter where you fall on the spectrum from “The World is coming to an End” to “Seismic Amazing Technology Changing the World for Good,” you can find someone, somewhere in support of your opinion.
A recent podcast from Hidden Brain: You 2.0: Cultivating Courage, got me thinking about these diverse opinions and an explanation for why with similar information, we can arrive at wildly different viewpoints. The episode takes a dive into bravery and cowardice and makes salient points on human behavior that have been honed over many thousands of years through natural selection and evolution. In fact the guest, Ranjay Gulati, makes the point that we are all primarily likely descended from “cowards”.
“I have no scientific basis for this, but I would like to hypothesize that most of us are descendants of cowards. Our ancestors, the ones who made it ran for cover. The ones who ran after danger didn’t quite make it”
But society tends to dislike “cowards” and celebrate bravery, and they go on to describe both in the context of human behavior. Look back into your own history and experiences, and you will likely find examples of both. For example, I am a coward when it comes to cave diving, nope, just nope. But offer me the scariest, fastest, most severe white-knuckle theme park ride – oh yes, please. I know, maybe that’s stupidity, not bravery, but I’ll own it.
As you dive into the details, there is a major difference when ti comes to uncertainty and risk. Risk is a measurable, probabilistic event with known potential outcomes. Uncertainty represents unknown, non-quantifiable, or “unknown unknown” scenarios
For most of us we operate well in the face of risk.
“Risk is where you have tools to assess, quantify, even mitigate it. Uncertainty is like a thick fog. No clear odds, no foolproof strategies. It turns out that most of us are able to deal with risk, tackle risk…Uncertainty actually activates the amygdala and it triggers what is considered a survival emotion, fear. It moves quickly, and it paralyzes us. …..It’s mostly flight or freeze. “
As I think about the AI revolution unfolding around us, we have a lot of uncertainty. And ironically, it is uncertainty that Machine Learning and Large Language Models (LLM’s) are fundamentally built to manage and quantify. So in some sense, the AI technology unfolding around us is better designed than most of us are at handling the world around!
So, as you ponder what this latest revolution in a long line of revolutions that have taken place in society
The Techno Panic Timeline
The fear that has translated into attacks on houses of AI industry executives is symptomatic of the fear permeating many of us, albeit extreme in nature.
I think I am safe in saying AI and the associated technologies are here to stay. So your choice is to get pulled into the native fear or find a way to manage this and adjust. We have seen some big leaps and expect many more.
From my perspective and the impact on healthcare, Agentic AI is unfolding in new and exciting ways to bring about real and lasting positive impact to the healthcare system in the US. Agentic AI can autonomously plan, make decisions, and take multi-step actions to achieve a defined goal, rather than just responding to single prompts. Unlike traditional AI, it behaves more like an “agent” by continuously reasoning, adapting, and interacting with systems, data, and workflows with minimal human intervention. When you look at the administrative overhead in the back office of physician offices, hospitals, and healthcare delivery systems, it is full of workflows staffed by ever increasingly burnt out people. Replacing repetitive activities and actions currently carried out by people, thanks to history, dogma, and prior decisions. Will this impact the work we do for sure, but see above for the technopanic timeline and the predictions of all these prior revolutions.
In the meantime, take a leaf out of the episode I referenced above and how firefighters as a group who take on heaps of uncertainty on a regular basis:
“Carl Weich looked at firefighters. When a firefighter goes into a building, they don’t know, there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty. How fast is the fire happening? How combustible is it? ….. Now, if you’re going to do your risk-adjusted calculation over here, you’re never going to go into the building. They don’t have that option. So they go into the building with an initial hypothesis. They’ve seen the building, the structure. They know how long the fire has been going on. They have a guess as to point of origin. Entry. Looking around, cues. What’s here? What’s there? Updating your theory.”
In other words, apply your existing knowledge and test the theory out. So, in the case of AI. If you are not using it, perhaps now is a time to take a little trip into the space. You can access tools for free on the web and on your phone, and try using these tools. Update your theory. Look around, what do you see, and what are people doing?
You might be pleasantly surprised and maybe even come up with your own persona, compelling use case for the technology in your environment, all while learning and updating your uncertainty with more information.
Meanwhile, thankfully, there are a few folks who, perhaps thanks to different wiring, are running fast into the new AI world, and much like similar folks in history, who took personal risk (Madam Curie, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, all these people put themselves at risk), we have many innovations and positive outcomes to thank them for
