1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Exactly, and the other thing on your empathy question, the fundamental issue around AI is that why is it even necessary for us to replace all healthcare with AI? It’s really powerful. Where AI is really capable and powerful is in diagnostics and non-siloed diagnostics.

Today’s healthcare system everywhere, definitely in America, is extremely siloed, right? So if you have some cardiac issues, there is a cardiologist’s office who is dealing with those. If you have cancer, there’s somebody else. For different cancers, different people are dealing with it – somebody is dealing with breast cancer, somebody else is dealing with blood cancer. It’s very siloed. Who’s looking at the whole picture? And there, I think AI is far more capable of doing that than a human physician.

Julien Pham: I completely agree with you. I think that in the history of medicine, physicians have had to evolve based on new major paradigm shifts on how we do medicine. In ancient and middle ages, people would taste earwax in order to diagnose conditions. This was kind of what you had back in the days, right? Now we’ve become more and more scientific and apply the scientific method in how we do research, have evidence now that we rely on, but at the end of the day, the human brain is only able to connect so many dots, compared to a machine.

So if you were to compare, in the example that you gave about looking at the body of evidence of a thousand plus studies on a particular type of breast cancer. Even if a physician had forty years of experience doing it, machine’s gonna do it better, right? But I think what we need is for the physicians to be able to kind of fine tune that. This is an easy example, it gets very nuanced and complex, but this is an example that everybody can understand, right?

If the machine is able to use all the knowledge in the world to try to identify what this particular condition is and is able to rank it and give you likelihoods of this being a particular condition and what can be done, it’s still up to the physician to use more human ways of connecting things to make the decision of the most likely diagnosis and the highest success rate for treatment. But for this ninety year old patient, if we use this treatment, they’re just not gonna survive it. So I have to think differently, right?

Sramana Mitra: Or the patient has something else going on in his system that is going to interfere with what the treatment that you’re prescribing. so that’s where non-siloed, personalized, holistic medicine can be powered by AI as a physician’s assistant. It doesn’t even need to replace a physician. It can be a physician’s assistant and that’s sufficient. And there already, there’s gonna be tremendous impact. And I think that’s where we need to reach.

And on the nursing side or the caregiving side, this is not something that needs to be dehumanized and replaced with AI. Because I think the human factor is tremendously valuable in care.

Robots don’t find it so easy to do simple tasks. The example that technologists and scientists give is that it’s very easy for human beings to pick up a coffee cup or make coffee. It’s not easy for a robot to do that. In robotics, that is a very, very complicated problem. A little human kid can do that. And if you have to replace all of healthcare caregiving with robotics, that is a very complex problem. It will happen probably, but it is not something that is urgent, and it is not where I think AI is gonna make the most difference. But in the medicine part of it, where it’s diagnostic treatment, acting as a physician’s assistant, AI can provide an enormously valuable help.

Julien Pham: Yes.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital
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