Why an ‘AI health coach’ won’t solve the world’s chronic disease problems

Last week, two big names in the artificial intelligence (AI) and wellness industry announced cooperation to develop a “bespoke, hyper-personalized AI health coach that will be available as a mobile app” to “reverse the trend lines of chronic disease.”

Sam Altman (head of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT) and Arianna Huffington (a former media executive who runs a high-tech wellness company called Thrive Global) announced their new company, Thrive AI Health, in an article in Time magazine advertisement.

Health is an attractive direction for an AI industry that has promised transformation of civilizationbut whose tremendous growth over the past few years is beginning to look like it is stalling. Companies and investors have billions in technology, but it often remains a solution looking for problems.

Meanwhile, venture capitalists Sequoia and the investment bank Goldman Sachs wonder aloud whether enough revenue and consumer demand will ever emerge to make this bubble feel more solid.

Meet the next big trend: artificial intelligence (AI) that will change our behavior, for our own good.

Personalized nudges and real-time recommendations

Altman and Huffington say Thrive AI Health will use “the best peer-reviewed science” and users’ “personal biometric, lab and other health data” to “learn your preferences and patterns in the five behaviors” essential to improving health and managing chronic disease: sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress management and social connection.

Whether you’re “a busy professional with diabetes” or someone without “access to trainers, chefs, and life coaches” (the only two user profiles the pair mention), the Thrive AI Health Coach aims to use behavioral data to create “personalized nudges and real-time recommendations” to change your daily habits.

Soon, everyone will reportedly have access to the “life-saving benefits” of a mobile app that tells you — in precisely targeted ways — to sleep more, eat better, exercise regularly, stress less, and go pet grass with friends. These “superhuman” technologies, combined with the “superpowers” ​​of incentives, will change the world by changing our “small, everyday actions.”

Despite claims that AI has enabled yet another innovation, I still had a sense of déjà vu when I read Altman and Huffington’s announcement.

Insurance that manages your life

Why did Thrive AI Health and the logic behind it sound so familiar? Because it’s a type of thinking we’re seeing more and more in the insurance industry.

In fact, in a article Last year, I suggested that we could soon see “total life insurance” bundled with “a personalized AI life coach” that would combine data from multiple sources in our daily lives to target us with prompts on how to behave more healthily and less riskily. It would, of course, take notes and report to our insurers and doctors when we don’t follow these recommendations.

In a related articleMy colleagues Kelly Lewis and Zofia Bednarz and I have been looking closely at the behavioral risk theories that could drive such products. An insurance model based on managing people’s lives through digital technology is emerging.

We investigated a company called Vitalitythat creates behavioral change platforms for health and life insurance. Vitality profiles itself as an “active life partner with […] customers’, using targeted interventions to improve customer well-being and their own profitability.

Similar projects in the past have had questionable results. A 2019 World Health Organization report about digital health intervention said:

Hyper-personalization

Altman and Huffington say AI-enabled “hyper-personalization” means this time will be different.

Are they right? I don’t think so.

The first problem is that there is no guarantee that the AI ​​will work as promised. There is no reason to think that it will not be plagued by the problems of bias, hallucinations and errors that we see in advanced AI models like ChatGPT.

But even if that happens, it still misses the mark, because the idea of ​​hyper-personalization is based on a flawed theory of how change happens.

An individualized “AI health coach” is one way to address widespread chronic health issues, but only if you imagine a world where there is no society, just individuals making choices. Those choices become habits. Those habits create problems over time. Those problems can be eradicated by individuals making better choices. Those better choices come from an AI guardian nudging you in the right direction.

And why do people make bad choices in this view? Maybe they, like middle-class professionals, are too busy. They need reminders to eat a salad and stretch in the sun during their 12-hour workday.

Or – again from the perspective of the AI ​​health coach – maybe, like disadvantaged people, they make bad choices out of ignorance. They need to be informed that eating fast food is wrong, and they should cook a healthy meal at home instead.

The social determinants of healthcare apps

But individual lifestyle choices aren’t everything. In fact, the “social determinants of health” can be much more important. These are the social conditions that determine whether someone has access to health care, quality food, leisure time and all the things needed to have a good life.

Technologies like Thrive AI Health are not interested in fundamental social conditions. Their “personalization” is a short-sighted vision that stops at the individual.

The only place where society enters the Altman and Huffington’s vision is as something that should contribute to the success of their product:

And if we don’t adapt society to AI models? We probably only have ourselves to blame.

This article has been republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.