TTA’s Summertime Wrap: Taking apart Humanity’s AI Doom; Oracle’s layoffs, financials, and House subpoenas; and how infrastructure health tech can’t get funding

September 17, 2026 | by | No Comments

17-30 September 2026

It’s hard to believe that the last Alert was before Labor Day, and here we are staring at the chronological End of Summer, bracing for a cold winter again. The 25th anniversary of 9/11 (real doom) was followed by Humanity’s Rumored Doom in 10 years at the hands of AI. My essay takes it apart and puts it back together. (Pro Tip–trust no one). We also caught up with Oracle trumpeting its Q1, laying off another 3,000, and its two top execs subpoenaed by the House VA Committee. This week’s Perspectives is about how infrastructure tech needed by healthcare organizations can’t get arrested on funding, while whiz-bang consumer apps can.

Please feel free to comment on the articles and pass along this Alert. Let me know if this is worth it to you! Also check out my personal page on Substack.

For Readers: Your Editor will be on a second publishing leave to 1-2 October. ‘Best Of’ Alerts will be out 1x weekly only on Fridays after this week till then. I’ll be resting up for what may prove to be an epic Q4!

Oracle’s continued restructuring cuts 3K more jobs, adds $700 million while revenue grows 30%; House VA Committee subpoenas Ellison, Sicilia 19-0 (The Oracle soap opera grinds on)

Perspectives: Digital Health Capital Keeps Rewarding What Patients See, Not What Keeps Companies Alive (Infrastructure tech can’t get funding)

AI’s hoofbeats as Horses, not Zebras: a Gimlety view of AI’s destructive capacity (updated) (P(doom) may be conquered by F(doom), or Why Worry?

Most recent headlines 

Silicon Valley Bank’s take on H1 investment: among the “have and have nots”, it was “the best half in years” for health tech

News roundup: Verma’s rumors, DEA’s new (?) telemedicine rule goes to OMB for review, Cityblock Health goes rural with Homeward buy, Scottish housing sensor tech could save millions–study

Revealed: Oracle’s extended VA EHRM contract increased by $17B as original ceiling reached this year; VA Indy EHR goes online

Must Reads

This Week’s Must Reads: how lack of focus dooms startup financing, Commure’s Sea of Red Flags Flapping, and what happens if OpenAI expires? (Doom…DOOM!)

Why Readers can be assured that TTA is 100% Written by Humans (A handy guide to detecting AI Copy Slop and why it’s not here)

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AI’s hoofbeats as Horses, not Zebras: a Gimlety view of AI’s destructive capacity (updated)

September 17, 2026 | by

Gimlet EyeA longish holiday does provide some Perspective of the Gimlety View. What blew up during the last big summer holiday, as I was building my Vitamin D for the long winter while at the Jersey Shore, was the news made by one Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic (developer of Claude), that advanced AI within 10 years has a more than 10% chance to have the ability to hack into enough systems, initiate bioweapons, nukes, and otherwise kill off Humanity. The humans who originally designed it would be unable to stop rogue (and roguish) frontier AI. This started with Coxon’s well-timed posting on X on 8 September and percolated through tech media right before the 25th anniversary of the mass murders on 9/11/01. Mass media, already overheated because of the anniversary, exploded like a pressure cooker. 

Axios, the techie bulletin board and for generalist media types a source for pithy quotes, on 9 September quoted a MIT 2025 study of “experts” giving a 21.5% chance of “AI possessing dangerous capabilities”, with a 21% chance of AI initiating “Cyberattacks, weapon development or use, and mass harm”.  It was a reasonably analytic article full of nuggets for a writer to run with.

This past week introduced us to the latest pop tech slang, P(doom), a cute term for the percent chance of AI Doomsday. P(doom) has now surfaced everywhere from Elon Musk to Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei. (Impress your friends and relatives at the next cocktail party or tailgating/cookout.)

The mass media in the following week ran with quotes by Coxon, old tech stalwarts, and politicians. Plenty of P(doom) predictions. Emblematic of the coverage was the Los Angeles Times recap published on, ironically, 11 September, a day of real, not theoretical, doom.

Readers know from my running coverage that this Editor is skeptical of AI both in a business sense (a financial time bomb) and of its utility in its current models. Automating many functions within healthcare? Sure. Providing deeper insights into imaging to speed diagnosis? Faster drug development? Bravo. Speeding market and marketing analysis, sussing out needs? Hey, hey! But equally I have been scathing of companies that buy AI services and believe vendor promises, without cross-checking for accuracy, dumping the skilled humans doing these jobs in mass layoffs. These people are the boots on the ground who should be doing the cross-checks and upgrading the models that come from developers usually unfamiliar with medicine and healthcare–and certainly without deep and specific knowledge the boots have. It turns out that the mass layoffs in many companies, from team managers, data analytics, customer services, marketers to operations, have been to fund so-called investments and token spending in AI tools. ROI has gone into a Missing Man Formation in the finance department, while services to customers and in healthcare, patients, go sideways–as does market share and revenue. CFOs, funders and Mr. Market are just waking up to this surprise that they forgot to teach at HBS. 

I’ve also been scathing in coverage of certain companies such as Open AI, Oracle, and somewhat so of Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, and Google. These companies are pushing one to two year bricks-and-mortar data center development without responsibility for local effects on water, power, noise, and land use–something that a GM, Ford, Toyota, or Worldwide Widgets building a factory would face and mitigate. This thoughtless pushing is proving to be politically evenhanded in opposition; these companies have received epic wedgies and a few pitchforks in their metaphorical derrieres as a deserved result. But this is manageable; because of pushback, it’s diminishing as a ‘reason why’ except as a political club for unscrupulous politicians.

What’s a lot more devastating is that apparently all the forecasting is inflated beyond belief. There is no decent idea of metrics, of matching up capacity to future demand. Not by OpenAI, not by Anthropic as they prep for IPOs. This is an ancient problem that always, reliably, cyclically bites developing sectors in their nether regions. Not a hype cycle like we saw circa 2006-15 with telehealth, not bad management, but in other industries within recent memory, with ‘sky’s the limit’ booms followed by a crash and partial/total hull loss:

TNW discusses in a deeper dive the debt structure and why PIMCO could make this bet where banks could not [reference is to Oracle’s debt funding]. The question it raises is whether the furious pace of data center building is another cycle of overbuilding–and if it is, will it be absorbed in time? The ominous parallels: the 2000s building boom in an earlier iteration of data centers, the fiberoptic boom of the early 2000s that broke WorldCom, Global Crossing, Winstar, Corning, and 360Networks, cloud overbuilding that left Amazon Web Services with years of excess capacity (it helps to have a deep-pocketed and not all that transparent parent), and others. This Editor would also liken it to the early years of 1980s-90s airline deregulation (too many airlines, too much debt, too many seats) and about a decade in the cruise ship industry where too many cabins were chasing too few people. These took decades and multiple bankruptcies to settle. TTA 7 May

Writer Ed Zitron, who has few parallels in Gimlety-ness, analyzed how OpenAI could easily meet the Devil of Demise sooner rather than later in his article What Happens If OpenAI Dies?, one of our Must Reads of 19 August. OpenAI’s losses are terrifying, contrary to their PR spin, and will not change in the immediate future; based on the numbers, their growth is slowing. It has to become the most successful company since Caesar Crossed The Rubicon–or it croaks and may well pull down an economy with it. I will add from other reading that Anthropic, ahead of OpenAI, is painted in a similar corner.

Leaving aside P(doom), what we are hearing are hoofbeats from horses, not zebras. What’s happening is the AI boom cooling and billions in concentrated funding that has hit multiple headwinds. Both companies have trillion-dollar valuations and heavy debt. Technical and security concerns are popping up like weeds (see the Hugging Face sandbox breakout).  Failures might not be the end of the world but not a cheerful earful for a stressed economy.

In the short term, the two major AI companies have more of a challenge from F(doom)–financial doom–than P(doom).

Suddenly, we have three things happening in the past 10 days:

  • A short-term, low-level former Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, with few followers on X, suddenly bursting out and ‘going wide’ with a doomsday prediction. Quoted and covered everywhere in mass media with the things that at least some of his elders like Steve Wozniak and Geoffrey Hinton have been saying for over three years. (The Woz I’ve traced back to 2015!)
  • Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Sam Altman, still CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk (Grok/X) then calling for government safety regulation. Not guardrails. Government regulation by a Federal agency, NIST. CNBC, OpenAI blog, Amodei blog statement
  • Online ‘surveys’ stating that the public is now terrified of AI, with 63% rating Humanity’s Destruction from ‘moderate risk’ to ‘almost certain to happen’. (POLITICO) 

Private companies demanding government regulation of their business truly boggles the mind. This should raise red flags as to why, and why now, and who writes those regulations.

P(doom) supposedly has a ten-year horizon. F(doom) works far faster, may be more likely, and once it starts, there may not be an Anthropic or OpenAI to worry about.

Some Gimlety Speculation, IMO only:

  • Both Anthropic and OpenAI float on a sea of red ink and Other People’s Money (OPM). Their lenders want to monetize and exit their investment with an IPO. Both companies were racing to IPOs. Except neither company is logically, reasonably, in any financial sense, ready.  Yet Anthropic was due to IPO before end of 2026 with OpenAI racing to beat them.
  • Investors are also pushing for another OpenAI funding round to cash out secondary shares held by employees, according to CNBC today (16 Sept). Which, in a case of an IPO, means more shares for the investors.
  • Both the Coxon media pickup and the subsequent Amodei/Altman calls for regulation effectively stop the IPO clock. One can speculate about the timing and origins, but it is fortuitous timing for both companies. .

It is also being used as a political club in the upcoming midterms. Goosing the ‘terror’ narrative is calculated to pay off certain players.

  • The usual Senate suspects are demanding complete regulation of AI because “we are losing control”. There is a bipartisan bill in the House (Lawler/Gottheimer) drafted to regulate frontier AI, kicking the standards over to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), but the House is now out of session until 9 November, after the midterms, which leaves exactly two months before a new House is seated. There is a parallel bill in the Senate.
  • President Trump, somewhat on the back foot on this, calls their fears a ‘hoax’ and a ‘scam’ that will prevent US leadership in AI development. Yet Sam Altman along with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang will be attending the state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington next week,
  • The security threat is real. China is building a lot of data centers, well away of course from any international observation; Uyghurs don’t get to complain about data centers and water usage to Beijing. One doesn’t even know if they are real or empty buildings like their empty hinterland cities. Where are the chips coming from? Yet Chinese-engineered AI models may take the lower end of the market, much like steel.

There’s an old saying in medicine: when you hear hoofbeats, think first of horses, not zebras. It dates back to Dr. Theodore Woodward of the University of Maryland medical school and the 1940s in teaching his students to first rule in or out common diseases rather than searching first for exotic, rare diseases because they’re more interesting. (Apologies to those with rare diseases, and may AI be a savior in this.) Taking the analogy to business, the ‘horses’ are the shaky business models around AI development, capacity versus demand, the heavy debt of the two AI leaders, and data centers. Throw in the Chinese capacity and models. The ‘zebras’ are Humanity’s Extinction By AI. They’re there, but in the next county.

What’s running in that herd out there, who’s trying to paint the horses black and white, and why? Cui bono? The consequences can be severe.

Updated 17 September: Gary Marcus, Substacker and BBC commentator, in his latest ‘Marcus on AI’ takes an even more Gimletly view than your Editor. He points out the stratagems behind Altman’s and Amodei’s calls for regulation. It’s all ‘trust us’ to write the regulations and guarantee safety. We shouldn’t. Meanwhile, certain Senators go over the top on Doom with the aim of terrifying voters. We shouldn’t. A Must Read. And if you are working with AI, worth your subscription.

Neuralink BCI human implant subject moving computer mouse by thought: Elon Musk

February 21, 2024 | by

The first patient implanted with the Neuralink brain-computer interface (BCI) reportedly is well and has moved a computer mouse cursor by thought. Mr. Musk said this Monday during an X Spaces event, according to Reuters. The thought control is limited to moving the cursor around the screen. Quoted in the Independent (UK), Musk said, “We’re trying to get as many button presses as possible from thinking. So that’s what we’re currently working on is: can you get left mouse, right mouse, mouse down, mouse up… We want to have more than just two buttons.” This is rapid progress, given that the implant was reported on 1 February.

Ars Technica discusses a salient point, which is ethics around reporting a medical study via, in this case, social media, and by the company founder. It is not the way that research is conventionally conducted especially at an early stage. Ars quotes two bioethics professors who wrote a brief essay on this published by the Hastings Center. The PRIME study took only quadriplegic volunteers and the study received a go-ahead from the FDA for this early feasibility study. The money quote: “When the person paying for a human experiment with a huge financial stake in the outcome is the sole source of information, basic ethical standards have not been met.” (However, in the view of the Editor, this entire ethical standard was fractured beyond repair by the Covid fiasco.) The writers also target the researchers, doctors, and other medical professionals taking part in the research. But taking this further, what happens if, as in many studies of high-risk devices, things go wrong? If this Editor were advising Mr. Musk, I would tell him to let his company and scientists do the talking–and stay mum until more solid results are achieved, or not. The two bioethicists also make the point that it could raise the hopes of those with serious paralysis, but that is true of all medical research. Another interesting discussion on Neuralink’s potential is on Yahoo!Finance. Previously in TTA 1 Feb. 

News roundup: Musk’s Neuralink implants first human BCI; Cigna’s $3.7B MA sale to HCSC; no Amazon deal for iRobot; DispatchHealth-Instacart food Rx; 5 India health tech fundings (updated)

February 1, 2024 | by

Elon Musk first out (again) with a human brain-computer interface (BCI). Announced Monday by Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, is the first human implant of a BCI. No details in the tweet beyond “recovering well’ and “promising neuron spike detection”. The device is a cosmetically invisible implant (N1) in the part of the brain that plans movements. It interprets neural activity, sending a signal to a computer or smartphone through thought. The N1 device, containing several dozen threads holding over 1,000 electrodes, is implanted by a R1 robot. FierceBiotech, MM+M Online

The subjects of the PRIME study are likely those recruited last fall after the FDA approved proceeding with a clinical trial. A blog post on the Neuralink website recruited adult volunteers with quadriplegia–paralysis of the arms and legs caused by a cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Earlier, Neuralink raised $280 million in a Series D led by Founders Fund. FierceBiotech 8 Aug 2023  There were difficulties, however. Within the past two years, Reuters reported 1,500 animal deaths over four years of research that attracted the attention of the Department of Transportation (DOT) (!) and the Department of Agriculture’s inspector general. FDA held up approval of human clinical trials until last year.

Research and companies in the BCI race have been making news since at least 2016 but have not reached clinical trials. In 2022 Synchron had an oversubscribed Series C of $75 million for the Stentrode blood vessel device (in clinical trials) and Synchron Switch BCI devices [TTA 17 Dec 22]. Last year, Precision Neuroscience raised $41 million in a Series B [TTA 28 Jan 23]. Their focus is on treatment of neurological illnesses and events such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, and dementia. Of course, one could debate implant ethics, but not for these limited uses right now.

To no one’s surprise including the relatively low price of $3.7 billion, Cigna sold its 600,000-member Medicare Advantage business to HCSC, beating out Elevance (the former Anthem). Cigna is also selling its supplemental benefits and Medicare Part D plans, along with CareAllies, a subsidiary that assists primary care practices with value-based care in Medicare and commercial plans. Together, they cover 3.6 million people, but the now-money-losing MA business represented only 2% of the total MA market. Closing is expected to be in 2025, subject to the usual regulatory approvals. HCSC currently operates in five states and this marks a major growth opportunity for them, if they pass state and Federal scrutiny.

Update: Some speculation remains that now that Cigna has agreed to sell the MA and other businesses, a Humana buy may be more of a go–at a reduced price given Humana’s recent earnings difficulties. This feels, to this Editor, like whistling in the dark. Prima facie, it ignores two factors: the major stumbling block was their respective strengths in pharmacy benefit management (PBM) though with different focuses, and that Cigna, having rid themselves of a money loser in MA, would buy it back and take on short term pain just to get bigger. Perhaps the two, because they seem to like dancing with each other, may partner in some areas like home health or other services, but for now the regulatory landscape is waaaay too hostile to mega-mergers in healthcare and the shareholders feel the same. Why buy the cow, etc.? MedCityNews  Further evidence? The CEO bragged about the sale as moving towards a leaner and more focused organization (the new catchphrase) on the 2 February earning call, as well as their interest in providing services via their Evernorth unit to MA providers, such as tying pharmacy services to the MA plans for four years after the HCSC buy. Healthcare Dive

iRobot sale to Amazon fails due to “no path to regulatory approval”, company lays off 31% of staff. In more bad news for Amazon, regulatory disapproval by the EU finally put paid to the deal for the Roomba maker. The EU found that Amazon’s ownership would have restricted competition in the robot vacuum cleaner category by restricting access to Amazon’s marketplace. This is no different than the FTC and DOJ in the US which blocked it for two years. Amazon will pay iRobot a $94 million breakup fee, which the latter will need as their market capitalization has crashed to $400 million from the $1.7 billion original sales price.  iRobot is reducing staff by 350, its CEO is also stepping down immediately, and they are concentrating now on margin improvements, restricting lines of business, and reducing R&D. CNBC  Consider this Lina Khan’s first ‘scalp’ in her War on Amazon.

DispatchHealth, an in-home care provider, has a new partnership with Instacart, a food delivery service, to directly address nutrition needs for their advanced care patients being treated at home.  Dispatch provides same-day, urgent medical care; hospital alternative care; and recovery care. With Instacart Health, Dispatch creates meal plans and medically tailored meals through shopping lists on Instacart that can be delivered direct to home. Payment must be made by the patient or if their Medicare Advantage plan permits. Food is a significant part of social determinants of health (SDOH) and Dispatch has found that 33% of their patients struggle with this and 22% have serious food insecurity. Orders can be made by phone, phone app, or website. McKnights Home Care, Mobihealthnews, DispatchHealth release   DispatchHealth has also experienced recent layoffs of 88 employees. Home Health Care News

And now for something completely different. India has been buzzing with several fundings in digital health. The roundup’s from Mobihealthnews with additional information from other sources:

  • CureBay, a rural-focused e-clinic from visits to lab tests and prescriptions with 90 locations, scored another Rs 620 million ($7.5 million) in funding as part of a Series A round led by Elevar Equity. IndianStartUpTimes
  • Mental health platform Amaha raised over Rs 50 million ($6 million) in an extended Series A funding round. The app-based treatement platform connects members with clinicians and psychiatrists. It also acquired the Delhi NCR-based Child and Adolescent Mental Health Institute, Children First, that has been providing support to 12,000+ families since its inception in 2008. Release
  • Healspan, an insurance tech startup that manages cashless health insurance claims for 60 hospitals, raised Rs 1.2 million (over $100,000) in pre-seed funding from a round led by startup accelerator PedalStart. ExpressHealthcare India
  • FlexifyMe, a chronic pain digital therapeutics platform with AI-powered patient scanning, gained pre-seed funding from angel platform ah! Ventures Angel Platform. Based in India but with operations in the US and Dubai, their therapy addresses back pain, cervical pain, spondylosis, and other conditions via what they term a unique combination of online physiotherapy, yoga therapy, and AI. BiospectrumIndia  In October, they had raised $1 million from Flipkart Ventures. Times of India
  • Docosage, described as an AI-driven health solutions provider with a telehealth consult, e-prescribing, lab testing, and genetic studies platform, also has an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from an individual angel investor. The funding will be used for strategic partnerships by exploring collaborations with hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, and incorporating tech advancements to enhance product features. ExpressHealthcare India 

*Updated 2 Feb for additional analysis around Cigna MA sale to HCSC and copy editing

AI good, AI bad. Perhaps a little of both?

August 1, 2017 | by

Everyone’s getting hot ‘n’ bothered about AI this summer. There’s a clash of giants–Elon Musk, who makes expensive, Federally subsidized electric cars which don’t sell, and Mark Zuckerberg, a social media mogul who fancies himself as a social policy guru–in a current snipe-fest about AI and the risk it presents. Musk, who is a founder of the big-name Future of Life Institute which ponders on AI safety and ethical alignment for beneficial ends, and Zuckerberg, who pooh-poohs any downside, are making their debate points and a few headlines. However, we like to get down to the concretes and here we will go to an analysis of a report by Forrester Research on AI in the workforce. No, we are not about to lose our jobs, yet, but hold on for the top six in the view of Gil Press in Forbes:

  1. Customer self-service in customer-facing physical solutions such as kiosks, interactive digital signage, and self-checkout.
  2. AI-assisted robotic process automation which automates organizational workflows and processes using software bots.
  3. Industrial robots that execute tasks in verticals with heavy, industrial-scale workloads.
  4. Retail and warehouse robots.
  5. Virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri.
  6. Sensory AI that improves computers’ recognition of human sensory faculties and emotions via image and video analysis, facial recognition, speech analytics, and/or text analytics.
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/AI.jpg” thumb_width=”200″ /]For our area of healthcare technology, look at #5 and #6 first–virtual assistants leveraging the older adult market like 3rings‘ interface with Amazon Echo [TTA 27 June] and sensory AI for recognition tools with broad applications in everything from telehealth to sleepytime music to video cheer-up calls. Both are on a ‘significant success’ track and in line to hit the growth phase in 1-3 years (illustration at left, click to expand).

Will AI destroy a net 7 percent of US jobs by 2027? Will AI affect only narrow areas or disrupt everything? And will we adapt fast enough? 6 Hot AI Automation Technologies Destroying And Creating Jobs (Forbes)

But we can de-stress ourselves with AI-selected music now to soothe our savage interior beasts. This Editor is testing out Sync Project’s Unwind, which will help me get to sleep (20 min) and take stress breaks (5 min). Clutching my phone (not my pearls) to my chest, the app (available on the unwind.ai website) detects my heart rate (though not giving me a reading) through machine learning and gives me four options to pick on exactly how stressed I am. It then plays music with the right beat pattern to calm me down. Other Sync Project applications with custom music by the Marconi Union and a Spotify interface have worked to alleviate pain, sleep, stress, and Parkinson’s gait issues. Another approach is to apply music to memory issues around episodic memory and memory encoding of new verbal material in adults aging normally. (Zzzzzzzz…..) Apply.sci, Sync Project blog

Behave, Robot! DARPA researchers teaching them some manners.

June 9, 2017 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Overrun-by-Robots1-183×108.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Weekend Reading While AI is hotly debated and the Drudge Report features daily the eeriest pictures of humanoid robots, the hard work on determining social norms and programming them into robots continues. DARPA-funded researchers at Brown and Tufts Universities are, in their words, working “to understand and formalize human normative systems and how they guide human behavior, so that we can set guidelines for how to design next-generation AI machines that are able to help and interact effectively with humans,” said Reza Ghanadan, DARPA program manager. ‘Normal’ people determine ‘norm violations’ quickly (they must not live in NYC), so to prevent robots from crashing into walls or behaving towards humans in an unethical manner (see Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics), the higher levels of robots will eventually have the capacity to learn, represent, activate, and apply a large number of norms to situational behavior. Armed with Science

This directly relates to self-driving cars, which are supposed to solve all sorts of problems from road rage to traffic jams. It turns out that they cannot live up to the breathless hype of Elon Musk, Google, and their ilk, even taking the longer term. Sequencing on roadways? We don’t have the high-accuracy GPS like the Galileo system yet. Rerouting? Eminently hackable and spoofable as WAZE has been. Does it see obstacles, traffic signals, and people clearly? Can it make split-second decisions? Can it anticipate the behavior of other drivers? Can it cope with mechanical failure? No more so, and often less, at present than humans. And self-drivers will be a bonanza for trial lawyers, as added to the list will be car companies and dealers to insurers and owners. While it will give mobility to the older, vision impaired, and disabled, it could also be used to restrict freedom of movement. Why not simply incorporate many of these assistive features into cars, as some have been already? An intelligent analysis–and read the comments (click by comments at bottom to open). Problems and Pitfalls in Self-Driving Cars (American Thinker)

Robot-assisted ‘smart homes’ and AI: the boundary between supportive and intrusive?

November 22, 2016 | by | 1 Comment
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Robot-Belgique-1.png” thumb_width=”200″ /]Something that has been bothersome to Deep Thinkers (and Not Such Deep Thinkers like this Editor) is the almost-forced loss of control inherent in discussion of AI-powered technology. There is a elitist Wagging of Fingers that generally accompanies the Inevitable Questions and Qualms.

  • If you don’t think 100 percent self-driving cars are an Unalloyed Wonder, like Elon Musk and Google tells you, you’re a Luddite
  • If you have concerns about nanny tech or smart homes which can spy on you, you’re paranoid
  • If you are concerned that robots will take the ‘social’ out of ‘social care’, likely replace human carers for people, or lose your neighbor their job, you are not with the program

I have likely led with the reason why: loss of control. Control does not motivate just Control Freaks. Think about the decisions you like versus the ones you don’t. Think about how helpless you felt as a child or teenager when big decisions were made without any of your input. It goes that deep.

In the smart home, robotic/AI world then, who has the control? Someone unknown, faceless, well meaning but with their own rationale? (Yes, those metrics–quality, cost, savings) Recall ‘Uninvited Guests’, the video which demonstrated that Dad Ain’t Gonna Take Nannying and is good at sabotage.

Let’s stop and consider: what are we doing? Where are we going? What fills the need for assistance and care, yet retains that person’s human autonomy and that old term…dignity? Maybe they might even like it? For your consideration:

How a robot could be grandma’s new carer (plastic dogs to the contrary in The Guardian)

AI Is Not out to Get Us (Scientific American)

Hat tip on both to reader Malcolm Fisk, Senior Research Fellow (CCSR) at De Montfort University via LinkedIn

Your Friday superintelligent robot fix: the disturbing consequences of ultimate AI

March 27, 2015 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Overrun-by-Robots1-183×108.jpg” thumb_width=”200″ /]Our own superintelligent humans–Elon Musk (Tesla), Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Stephen Hawking–are converging on artificial intelligence, not just everyday, pedestrian robotics, but the kind of AI superintellect that could make pets out of people–if we are lucky. In his interview with Australian Financial Review, the Woz (now an Australian resident) quipped: ‘Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on?’ (more…)