In this episode of the show, I sit down with Dr. Robert Pearl to talk about his new book, ChatGPT, MD: How AI-Empowered Patients & Doctors Can Take Back Control of American Medicine, a book he co-authored with...ChatGPT! We talk about the deep fractures and problems in American health care that Generative AI may be positioned to solve, the changing landscape of health care, and  the possibility that Amazon, Google, or OpenAI may become the nation's latest healthcare providers.   For 18 years, Dr. Robert Pearl, MD served as CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (Kaiser Permanente). He is also former president of The Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group. In these roles he led 10,000 physicians, 38,000 staff and was responsible for the nationally recognized medical care of 5 million Kaiser Permanente members on the west and east coasts.  He is a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on healthcare strategy, technology, and leadership. Pearl is board-certified in plastic and reconstructive surgery, receiving his medical degree from Yale, followed by a residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University. He’s the author of three books: Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Healthcare—And Why We’re Usually Wrong, a Washington Post bestseller (2017); Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients, a Kirkus star recipient (2021); and his newest book ChatGPT, MD: How AI-Empowered Patients & Doctors Can Take Back Control of American Medicine (April 2024). All profits from sales of his books go to Doctors Without Borders. Dr. Pearl is a LinkedIn “Top Voice” in healthcare and host of the popular podcasts Fixing Healthcare and Medicine: The Truth. He publishes two monthly healthcare newsletters reaching 50,000+ combined subscribers. A frequent keynote speaker, Pearl has presented at The World Healthcare Congress, the Commonwealth Club, TEDx, HLTH, NCQA Quality Talks, the National Primary Care Transformation Summit, American Society of Plastic Surgeons, and international conferences in Brazil, Australia, India, and beyond. Pearl’s insights on generative AI in healthcare have been featured in Associated Press, USA Today, MSN, FOX Business, Forbes, Fast Company, WIRED, Global News, Modern Healthcare, Medscape, Medpage Today, AI in Healthcare, Doximity, Becker’s Hospital Review, the Advisory Board, the Journal of AHIMA, and more.

In this episode of the show, I talk to Dr. Tamara Kneese about Data and Society's initiative to develop standards and ways to measure the environmental impact of AI. I talk to Dr. Kneese about her work at the Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab (AIMLab), we talk about the links and frictions between tech and climate change, and we consider how AI may be changing how we experience not only life, but also our experience of death. Dr. Tamara Kneese is Project Director of Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab, where she is also a Senior Researcher. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she's a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. Before joining D&S, she was Lead Researcher at Green Software Foundation, Director of Developer Engagement on the Green Software team at Intel, and Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. Dr. Kneese holds a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU and is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond. In her spare time, she is a volunteer with Tech Workers Coalition.

In today's episode, I sit down with Dr. Peter Bonutti to talk about the ways in which technologies are revolutionizing our understanding of the brain, and how they may be used to treat crippling brain disorders such as stroke and seizures. Dr. Peter Bonutti, M.D. is a surgeon, inventor, author, professor, consultant, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Bonutti Research, a medical device incubator that has developed products and technology used around the world. He maintains his clinical and surgical practice, focusing on the integration of robotics into surgical procedures. He is the founder and president of Releave, a company whose technology has already been clinically proven in more than 700 patients for the treatment of a brain related disorder. Realeve’s ultimate goal is to solve one of the critical remaining barriers in brain health: the ability to bypass the brain's natural barrier preventing the delivery of effective drugs for stroke, cancer treatment, and other degenerative orders. Dr. Bonutti is a pioneer in Minimally Invasive Surgery, has over 500 patents and applications, more than 700 licenses and multiple FDA-approved products to date. Major corporations leveraging his technology include Hitachi, Kyphon, Covidien, US Surgical, Biomet, Arthrocare, Synthes, Zimmer/Biomet and Stryker. He is a prolific speaker, lecturing internationally, and has trained over 100 surgeons on his surgical techniques. In his career, Dr. Bonutti has received more than a dozen industry honors and awards for his achievements. Dr. Bonutti earned his medical degree at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and completed his Orthopaedic Surgery Residency at Cleveland Clinic Foundation with international fellowships in Canada, Australia, and Austria.

Today I am interviewing Dr. Sam Sammane about his forthcoming book, "The Singularity of Hope”, which aims to guide readers through the challenges and opportunities of the AI era, advocating for a harmonious fusion of human intelligence and machine capabilities. Dr. Sammane envisions a world where the rapid advancements in AI and technology are harnessed for the greater good, leading to a new age of global prosperity. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple success exits, and an academic with a rich blend of expertise in applied physics, digital circuit design, nanotechnology, formal methods, life science, and business. Holding a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree in Applied Physics, a Master's degree in Digital Circuit Design, and a Ph.D. in Nanotechnology, Dr. Sammane has authored several articles on high-order logic, symbolic simulation, and automatic theorem proving.  Beyond the academic realm, Dr. Sammane has co-founded and led multiple successful companies in the life sciences, IT and real estate industries. He resides in southern California with his wife and three daughters.

Welcome back to a brand-new season of Technically Human! We’re thrilled to be back with new episodes of the show. We are kicking off the new season, and the new year, with an episode featuring one of my favorite thinkers, Dr. Deborah Stone, to talk about what it means to count—that is to say, what it means to measure, and what it means to matter. Dr. Deborah Stone is currently a Lecturer in Public Policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also an Honorary Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she occasionally teaches as a visiting professor. She has taught at Duke University in the Institute of Policy Sciences (1974-77); MIT Department of Political Science (1977-86); Brandeis University Heller School, where she held the David R. Pokross Chair of Law and Social Policy (1986-99); and Dartmouth College Government Department, where she was Research Professor of Government (1999-2014). She has taught as a visitor at Yale, Tulane, University of Bremen, Germany, and National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT. Stone is the author of Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision-Making, which has been published in multiple editions (W.W. Norton), translated into five languages, and won the Aaron Wildavsky Award from the American Political Science Association for its enduring contribution to policy studies. She has also authored three other books: The Samaritan’s Dilemma (Nation Books, 2008), The Disabled State (Temple University Press 1984), and The Limits of Professional Power (University of Chicago Press, 1980). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Health Politics, and Policy and Law (of which she was a founder); Women, Politics and Public Policy, and Critical Policy Studies. In addition to numerous articles in academic journals and book chapters, she writes for general audiences. She was the founding senior editor of The American Prospect and her articles have appeared there as well as in in Nation, New Republic, Boston Review, Civilization, Natural History, and Natural New England. Stone has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard Law School, German Marshall Fund, Open Society Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholar in 2005-2006, and a Senior Fellow at Demos from 2008-2012. She has served as a consultant to the Social Security Administration, the Institute of Medicine, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the Human Genome Project. Stone is also the recipient of numerous professional awards, including, the 2013 Charles M. McCoy Career Achievement Award for a progressive political scientist who has had a long successful career as a writer, teacher, and activist (American Political Science Association).

In this episode of the show, I talk with Jared Maslin about what it means to have privacy on the internet. We talk about the difference between privacy and secrecy, the benefits and limitations of GDPR and the possibility of privacy regulation coming to the US, and we explore the biggest challenges facing data privacy today. His most recent work, including his most recent publication, "Learning From the Past: Applying Concepts of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to Restore Consumer Trust in Global Data Privacy," involves the design and testing of a more holistic data privacy risk model, using some of the key tenets of independent auditing structures and oversight functions seen after the investor crises of Enron, Tyco, and other financial reporting fraud. Their goal is to leverage the same concepts that were once applied to restore investor trust in businesses, and to extend those concepts to data privacy in order to restore consumer trust in the businesses processing their personal data. 

In this week’s episode of the show I sit down with Dr. Tonya Evans to talk about the state of crypto in the wake of last week’s landmark criminal fraud conviction of the former CEO of FTX and the former prophet of crypto, Sam Bankman-Fried. Dr. Evans and I discuss what new crypto economy might emerge in the wake of his conviction. We discuss the principles and the possibilities of new digital assets, and we talk about the challenges of regulating new financial technologies. Dr. Tonya M. Evans is a distinguished professor at Penn State Dickinson Law and a leading expert in intellectual property and new technologies. With a prestigious 2023 EDGE in Tech Athena Award, she is highly sought-after as a keynote speaker and consultant. Her expertise spans blockchain, entrepreneurship, entertainment law, and more. As a member of international boards and committees, including the World Economic Forum/Wharton DAO Project Series, Dr. Evans remains at the forefront of cutting-edge research. She recently testified before the House Financial Services Committee and the Copyright Office and USPTO to advise on the intellectual property law issues related to NFTs and blockchain technology.

In today’s episode, I talk about how to create new legal rules to guide tech toward reflecting human values with Brian Beckcom, one of the leading lawyers of his generation. Brian Beckcom is a Texas Super Lawyer, a designation that recognizes him as one of the top legal experts and practitioners in his arena. In addition to his work as a lawyer, he is also a Computer Scientist and a Philosopher. He created and hosts the popular podcast "Lesson from Leaders with Brian Beckcom." Brian is an honors graduate of the University of Texas School of Law. He is the author of 6 books and hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics. He successfully prosecuted many high-profile cases, including the case that emerged in the aftermath of the Somali Pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama, which made headlines around the world, and the event was made into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Hanks as Captain Phillips. Representing many members of the crew, Brian and his firm took on one of the largest shipping companies in the world, while simultaneously, his investigative efforts ensured that the true story was told.He also represented Captain Wren Thomas, who was kidnapped by Nigerian mercenaries while operating off the Coast of West Africa. Captain Thomas’ story has been featured in national and international media. The case received international attention from the media and maritime shipping companies because of the heroic acts of Captain Thomas during the attack and hostage situation and also because of connections to Boko Haram and corruption in West Africa. In the conversation we talk about the way that case law formed to treat piracy, that is to say, the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea, and piracy in our digital age, that is to say, the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted content that is then sold at substantially lower prices in the 'grey' market, We talk about the possibilities for, and the obstructions to, creating legislation that would stop some of the worst consequences and tendencies of big tech. And Brian makes the case for what law, at its most ethical and generative potential, might do to guide tech toward protecting and elevating human values.

In this episode of the show, I sit down with Dr. Mark Sagar to talk about his vision of an embodied form of AI. Dr. Sagar is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Soul Machines, a company investigating how to use natural language processing with hyper-realistic visuals to create autonomously animated, emotionally dynamic Digital People. In addition to developing new technologies, the research seeks answers to big questions: should we be humanizing AI? How does feeding AI socio-emotional context help create rich, multimodal humanlike experiences, and at what point are we teetering on sentience? And what is really at stake the intersection of human cooperation with intelligent machines? Dr. Mark Sagar is currently Director for the Auckland Bioengineering Institute's Laboratory for Animate Technologies. He is a two-time Oscar winner, in the categories of scientific and engineering awards, for his work creating realistic digital characters for the screen. The technology has been used in Spider-Man 2, Superman Returns, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar. The technology he created emerged out of his research, completed in the late 1990s, in a landmark study that explored how to develop an anatomically correct virtual eye and realistic models of biomechanically-simulated anatomy. It was one of the first examples of how believable human features could be created on a screen by combining computer graphics with mathematics and human physiology.  He is also the founder of the BabyX, a pioneering research initiative that  seeks to combine models of physiology, cognition and emotion with advanced lifelike CGI, in an attempt to create a new form of biologically inspired AI. Dr. Sagar received his Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Auckland, and was a post-doctoral fellow at M.I.T. In addition to his recognition by the Academy Awards, Dr. Sagar was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2019.

Hi Technically Human listeners. This is a show about ethics and tech, but it’s also a show about what it means to be human. There is no area of being human in this moment that technologies does not touch. I know that many members of this listening community have been deeply affected by the loss of life and the brutality that began with the Hamas attack on Israel and is ongoing in Israel and in Gaza. This is not a show about my politics. But it is a show that strives toward the ideals of diverse representation, and bipartisan collaboration toward ethical and humanistic ends. In this dark moment, I wanted to elevate one of our previous episodes featuring United Hatzalah. United Hatzallah is a volunteer-based organization which provides emergency medical response within minutes of any medical emergency for free. They are committed to saving human lives independent of race, religion, ethnicity, or national identity. They are non political and non religious. United Hatzalah volunteers respond to more than 675,000 calls per year throughout Israel and beyond its borders, saving lives every day.  There are a lot of people in the region in need right now, and United Hatzallah is on the front lines. If you have the means, and if you want to support an organization that is working to save civilians lives, no matter what their religion, race, ethnic identity, or national identity might be, please consider supporting United Hatzallah. Insight Partners, a global software investor partnering with high-growth technology, software and internet startups, is currently matching donations to United Hatzallah, up to $1,000,000. Please consider supporting this effort, if you have the means. The ideal of universal human rights is central to this show, and when I see the tech community driving toward that effort, I think it’s worth highlighting. That ideal is, and always has been, that human lives are human lives anywhere and everywhere, no matter which tribe they belong to, and that the global community has an obligation to protect those lives.  Link to the donation site here: https://hedado.com/c/SoftwareinService  And now, here is my episode featuring United Hatzallah, whose volunteers have been on the ground saving lives, as they have been doing since the organization was founded.