AI Wants to Change Your Grandma's Diapers (For Just $150 Million)

Another startup just raised $150 million to revolutionize healthcare with AI, which I’m reading about while nursing my third bourbon of the morning. The company’s called Cera - like the waxy stuff that builds up in your ears, I guess - and they’re promising to predict when your grandmother’s going to face-plant into her knitting basket.

Let me take another sip before I dig into this mess.

Here’s the deal: the UK’s healthcare system is about as functional as I am after a three-day bender. The NHS is basically being held together with duct tape and good intentions at this point. So naturally, here come the tech wizards, waving their AI wands and promising digital salvation.

AI Plays Doctor: Pass The Bourbon, I Need a Second Opinion

Look, I didn’t plan on writing this piece today. I woke up with what I thought was just another hangover, but WebMD had other ideas. Three hours and sixteen whiskeys later, I’m apparently suffering from either temporal lobe epilepsy or an acute case of reading too many AI press releases. Speaking of which…

Some lab coats over at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center just dropped a study that’s got everyone’s panties in a twist. They pitted 50 real doctors against ChatGPT in a diagnosis showdown. The kind of story that makes venture capitalists wet their Brooks Brothers suits and medical students question their student loans.

The Computational Tragedy of the Medical Mind

When I first encountered the news that ChatGPT outperformed doctors in diagnosis, my initial reaction wasn’t surprise - it was amusement at our collective inability to understand what’s actually happening. We’re still stuck in a framework where we think of AI as either a godlike entity that will enslave humanity, or a humble digital intern fetching our cognitive coffee.

The reality is far more interesting, and slightly terrifying: we’re watching the collision of two fundamentally different types of information processing systems. Human doctors process information through narrative structures, built up through years of experience and emotional engagement. They construct stories about patients, diseases, and treatments. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is essentially a pattern-matching engine operating across a vast landscape of medical knowledge without any need for narrative coherence.

Robot Doc Knows Best (And My Bourbon Agrees)

Listen, I’ve spent enough time in emergency rooms - both as a patient and killing time between bars - to know that doctors aren’t exactly the infallible gods they pretend to be. But here’s something that’ll make you spill your drink: ChatGPT just spanked a bunch of MDs at their own game, and I’m not talking about golf at the country club.

Let me set this straight while I pour another bourbon: Some docs at Beth Israel Deaconess (fancy name for a hospital, right?) decided to pit ChatGPT against real flesh-and-blood physicians. One guy, Dr. Rodman, thought he knew exactly how it would play out - AI would be the trusty sidekick, like my liver to my drinking habit. Boy, was he wrong.

Two Trust Fund Kids Try to Fix Healthcare, Fail Spectacularly

Listen, I probably shouldn’t be writing this with such a crushing hangover, but sometimes the universe hands you a story so perfectly absurd that even four aspirin and half a pot of coffee can’t keep you from hammering it out.

Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington – a power couple that sounds like the setup to a bad joke about a tech bro and a media mogul walking into a bar – have decided they’re going to revolutionize healthcare with AI. Their love child is called Thrive AI Health, and sweet Jesus, it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from people who think having money makes them qualified to fix complex social problems.