It was only last fall that Open AI’s ChatGPT thrust generative AI into the public psyche. Since then, many future-looking surveys have shown unease and trepidation competing hard for mindshare against hope and excitement. At times the pessimism seems to be gaining the upper hand.

Change might be afoot. This week Steve Rose of the UK newspaper The Guardian challenged AI leaders representing five areas of expertise to argue that AI’s societal pros will ultimately prevail over its cons. Here are condensed excerpts of their written responses.

1. HEALTHCARE: Having better models could be a bona fide gamechanger for drug discovery.

• “Currently, it costs a billion dollars to develop a new drug; it could easily be 10 times less with these [AI] advances. It is probably going to take years before people see an effect, but dozens of startups have been created at the intersection of AI and drug discovery, while pharmaceutical companies are beefing up their machine-learning departments. I am pretty sure it’s going to be an amazing revolution in terms of healthcare.”—Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms

2. CLIMATE: Using AI to accelerate weather and climate simulations can inform timely interventions and policy decisions.

• “We already have really good climate models, but sometimes they can take months to run, even on supercomputers, and that is an obstacle. We understand climate change very well, but that doesn’t mean we know exactly what is going to happen at each point. Having faster climate models can aid local and regional responses.”—David Rolnick of McGill University, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms and Climate Change AI

3. TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS: Accessible AI systems can give every user a virtual teacher, facilitating fruitful exchanges among and between humans.

• “Truly advanced AI systems could be more than just another technology; they could automate and radically accelerate the process of technological progress itself. In just a couple of decades, humanity could get to the kind of advanced future that feels like it’s hundreds or thousands of years away. This is not at all guaranteed, but I think it’s within reach if we get this right.”—Ajeya Cotra of Open Philanthropy and Planned Obsolescence

4. HUMAN FLOURISHING: AI can help us thrive not just for the next election cycle but for billions of years.

• “We have been on this planet for more than 100,000 years, and most of the time we haven’t had much control of our destiny. Science and technology and human intelligence have made us the captains of our own ship. If we can build and control superintelligence, we can quickly go from being limited by our own stupidity to being limited by the laws of physics. It could be the greatest empowerment moment in human history.”—Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5. QUALITY OF LIFE: AI is going to improve everything.

• “Most movies about AI have an ‘us versus them’ mentality, but this is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines. It’s the result of our own efforts to make our infrastructure and our way of life more intelligent. It’s part of human endeavor. We merge with our machines. Ultimately, they will extend who we are.”—Ray Kurzweil of Google (and too many other research, invention and futurism settings to list here)

Read the rest at The Guardian.

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• Healthcare regulators should establish a whole new category for large-language AI models. Why? Because they’re substantially different from AI-based medical technologies that have already gone through regulation. That’s one recommendation with rationale from the Hungarian medical futurist Bertalan Meskó and the American cardiologist/bestselling author Eric Topol. Laying out a set of five action items, the two offer their guidance in a paper published in full for free July 6 in npj Digital Medicine.
   
• Colleges and universities should prepare staff as well as students to use generative AI. And while they’re at it, they best “prepare students to use generative AI tools appropriately; adapt teaching and assessment to incorporate the ethical use of AI while ensuring equal access to it; ensure academic integrity is upheld; and share best practices as the technology evolves.” The Russell Group of 24 top U.K. universities is promoting these aims in a set of guiding principles published for educational institutions. The principles are surely applicable beyond the U.K. The Guardian has the story.
   
• Remember when students had to be warned to master math skills because they wouldn’t always have a calculator handy? Quaint memory, right? Today the people wrestling with dependency on electronic devices include physicians. Count a pulmonary and critical-care specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital among their number. “If the thought process to arrive at a diagnosis can be done by a computer ‘co-pilot’ [outfitted with AI], how does that change the practice of medicine, for doctors and for patients?” writes Daniela Lamas, MD, in a July 6 New York Times opinion piece. But there’s no denying the obvious things to come, she concedes. “Beyond saving us time, the intelligence in AI—if used well—could make us better at our jobs.”
   
• The state legislature of New York has passed a measure to watchdog AI. The bill aims to maximize the technology’s benefits while minimizing its harms. Also awaiting an expected signature from Gov. Kathy Hochul is a bill that would ban the digital dissemination of “deepfake” images. July 3 Newsday coverage here.
   
• A medical journal with a decent impact factor is looking for a few good submissions on healthcare AI and/or robotics. The journal is the open-access Cureus. The editors are hoping for manuscripts of all sorts from physicians, researchers, engineers and others “working in this fascinating intersection of technology and health.” Deadline is August 18. Details here.
   
• Eyecare has an Empire State AI center of its own. Newly launched by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Center for Ophthalmic Artificial Intelligence and Human Health will help advance predictive cardiovascular care. The connection is there for the exploring because recent research has shown a link between heart problems and abnormalities identifiable in retinal fundus photos. And AI has shown itself a champ at analyzing those.  Announcement.
   
• 21-hospital Ballad Health (Johnson City, Tenn.) has tapped MedAware (Ra’anana, HaMerkaz, Israel) to help head off medication errors. The company’s AI software will scan the health system’s EHR to supply real-time evaluation of prescribed drugs against continuously updated patient profiles. Announcement.
   
• CloudMD (Vancouver, B.C.) has sold off its assets in the product categories of EMR, practice management and revenue cycle management. The assets, which CloudMD deemed outside its core business, fetched around $6.3 million from a subsidiary of N. Harris Computer Corp. Announcement.
   
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Radiology Business—Imaging AI vendors’ marketing hype doesn’t always match materials submitted to the FDA
  • Cardiovascular Business—AI can help novice sonographers deliver optimal echocardiograms
  • Health Imaging—Lumbar MRI exam duration cut in half using deep learning-based reconstruction algorithm