By Mike Magee
In a speech to the American Philosophical Society in January 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer Said: “We made something … that the nature of the world has changed abruptly and deeply … We have again asked whether science is good for people, whether it is good to learn about the world, to understand, try to control it, to help give it to the world of men raised insight, increased power.”
Eight decades later those words resound, and we are again at a groundbreaking intersection. Last week Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, everywhere, was a remarkably competent communicator that celebrated the fact that his company was now the first listed company that was a $ 4 trillion appreciation.
When He explained”In essence, we have created a new industry for the first time in three hundred years. The last time there was an industry like this, it was an industry for power generation … Now we have a new industry that generates intelligence … You can use it to discover new medicines, to accelerate the diagnosis of diseases … Everyone’s courses will be different in the future.”
Jensen seemed to perform on that morning show, just a bit overwhelmed, impressed and perhaps even somewhat afraid of the pace of recent change. “We reinvented computing for the first time since the 60s, Since IBM introduced the modern computer architecture … Its able to acceleration applications from computer graphics to physics simulations for science to digital biology. . AI is able to think … Before it was Able to Understand, but now it can reas, IT can learn more about the latest information before it answers a question. “
Of course this is hardly the first time that technology has to do with flashy ethical warning lights. I recently summarized the case Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). The US has the largest number of closed circuit cameras 15.28 per head of the populationIn the world. On average, every American is caught on a closed circuit camera 238 times a weekBut experts say that this is nothing compared to where our ‘surveillance’ society will be in a few years.
The FRT field is on fire.
There is research forward Projects an annual investment of USD of almost $ 14 billion in 2028 with a compound annual growth rate of almost 16%. Detection, analysis and recognition are all potential winners. There are now 277 Unique organizational investor groups Offering “breakthroughs” in FRT with an average decade experience on their backs.
But Frt, as great and disturbing as it is, took a back seat last week David Ignatius’S Washington post -article entitled “How the spy game will work if there is no place to hide.” In the opening sentence, he shares the warning of 2018 for a CIA case officer who explains with confidence that “computer algorithms could soon identify people, not only because of their faces, or fingerprints or DNA – but because of the unique ways they walked.”
Speculation with wild eyes? Apparently not. In one Cornell Scientific publication On May 7, 2025, researchers who use a model named Farsight could confirm the human identity from 1,000 meters through the walking assessment (including measures) with 83% accuracy. For spies that work in secret and their movement and communication at all costs, there is now literally ‘no place to hide’.
A moment of reflection is everything needed to appreciate that the distance between that of a spy cover And trade And our own daily privacy and confidentiality (including health -related information) is indeed narrow. Consider former CIA director, Gene. David H. What Words in 2012: “We have to reconsider our notions of identity and confidentiality … Every left behind reveals information about location, habits and, through extrapolation, intention and probably behavior.”
Thirteen years later, Ignatius Last week asked: “We started a new era where AI models are smarter than people. Can they also be better spies? That is the riddle that creative AI companies are investigating.”
But because nobody knows better than the chairman of Nvidia, the bleeding of AI in human sectors is now almost complete. Even before the walking recognition, AI was powered FRT technology omnipresent. They are everywhere protection, e-commerce, car licenses, banking, immigration, airport protection, media, entertainment, traffic cameras and now healthcare with diagnostic, therapeutic and logistical applications that are at the forefront.
Machine Learning and AI have enabled FRT to move speech recognition, Iris scanning and fingerprints. And now “walking recognition” (plus data -tracking) can theoretically uncover the identity of even masked face agents in one of their La Children’s Park -raids.
Yet Jensen Huang sees this revolution and both manageable and progressive. He said last week: “A lot 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 fields that I have become different for young people and just got a better diagnosis.
Does something keep him awake at night? What about the fact that 80% of students in China Are you going for a master’s degree? And this while we are fascinated when recruiting the best overseas spirits through tariff and visa wars and targeted attacks on our most important universities.
Speak with the Hill & Valley Forum In Washington, DC on 1 May 2025, Huang emphasized the importance of maintaining an innovation label in controlling the risk/benefit industry of this technological revolution.
His worries? 1) More than 50% of the AI researchers in the world are Chinese. 2) Their AI algorithms and codes are open source, while ours are non-transparent and escape-regulating public/private control. 3) Our politics seems to be confronted and out of synchronization with technology that is ‘ahead at full speed’.
Mike Magee MD is a medical historian and regular correspondent from THCB. He is the author of Blue code: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)
#walk #health #care #blog