Tag: DOC

Quitting A Digital Habit

Amongst friends and family, I’m known as something of a digital curmudgeon. I’m usually the one person in group chats who does not use an iPhone, a habit I gave up in 2012 when I sensed that Apple was enclosing the entire mobile space. I stopped visiting Facebook and Instagram a decade ago, and I left Twitter in 2022, the year Musk took over. I refuse to employ AI chatbots as therapists, friends, or any kind of replacement for human engagement. I turned off all notifications on my phone – even for calls – 15 years ago.

Given my early bona fides in all things digital, I take a bit of pride in my heterodoxy, though in practice it creates friction, both for me and my friends and colleagues. Silencing notifications forced me into a new habit of checking my phone proactively, which one could argue has its own downsides. My Google phone breaks group chats, my absence from Meta’s products means I miss updates from friends and family, my aversion to AI therapy could mean I’m out of touch with how technology is changing society (though my adult children do keep me somewhat in the know on this count).

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Will AI Replace Doctors?

DOC 2025 Debaters: Reid Hoffman, Eric Verdin, Anitha Kannan, and Mike Krieger

At the inaugural DOC gathering last year, famed Valley VC Vinod Khosla made a bold prediction: AI will soon make medical care “essential free,” while at the same time enabling human doctors to scale their knowledge and caregiving five to ten fold. Bill Gates has made similar claims – and gone even further, saying that AI will “replace many doctors” with 10 years.

As we all contemplate a future of “AI everywhere,” perhaps no question is more polarizing than this: Will AI make human work obsolete? And if so, what happens to all of us? It’s the defining question of Mustafa Suleyman’s 2023 book “The Coming Wave,” in which Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, argues that AI will have “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce. “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton strikes a darker tone, warning “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”

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A “White Collar Recession”? It Won’t Be AI’s Fault.

Image from “The White Collar Recession” – Salesforce

BULLSHIT!

That’s what I found myself yelling at a recent board meeting, unimpeded by my usual filters of propriety or self-restraint. But I couldn’t help myself. The board was debating whether AI was going to come for all of our jobs, and someone had just referenced an article which said it wouldn’t be long before AI was doing the work of most doctors, lawyers, and – this is where I broke – writers.

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Wait, What’s This DOC Thing You’re Doing?!

An old friend asked me what I was up to the other day, and despite two years having passed since I started getting that question (here’s my first post on the subject), I realized I’ve not made much progress on a concise answer. Usually I’ll list the various projects that currently fill my day – working on the P&G Signal conference, trying my best to be a good board member at a number of media, tech, and data companies, managing various investments, and running a new health event I co-founded last year called DOC. 

“Wait,” my friends invariably ask. “Why are you involved in a health project?!”

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