AI is not going to replace clinicians but clinicians who use AI are going to replace clinicians who don't use AI it comes down to the bottom line and they're going to implement AI just because it's cheaper faster and it's scalable I feel like it's invalidating us as humans I'd like to still have a job next year I am signing a pension with no dollars because sooner or later they're going to go how to use it so it isn't used against you so we are talking about AI in the workforce people are largely pretty divided divided
here too I think fair to say over here we've got wary maybe a little fearful over here some full-on fans now backstage future of work Economist Armenian is listening in we'll bring her in shortly so Dr mamdani I'd like to start with you you work at Unity Health you work with AI all the time what might surprise us about what AI has done in your Workforce yeah I think um the implications of AI can be quite profound in our emergency department it has reduced human effort on simple tasks by over 80 percent so tasks that
normally take two to four hours every day by a few people it's reduced to under 15 minutes error rates have went from over 20 to under five percent what this algorithm does is it looks at historical data all sorts of patterns it scrapes the web for weather data to see if there's going to be a snowstorm tomorrow night it looks for events like marathons on Lakeshore Boulevard on Sunday with all of that we can tell you Saturday from noon to six there'll be 80 patients waiting in the emergency department 10 of them will have mental
health issues 12 of them will be hard to treat the rest will be easier with between 94 to 96 accuracy that helps us plan better that helps the staff better it helps us take care of our patients better we've we have algorithms that are running monitoring patients as we speak every hour on the hour that has resulted in significant reductions in mortality I'm gonna stop you because these these sound like very important things that people used to do so has anyone lost their job there will be some mundane things where we won't need a person
to do it those are going to be jobs I hear mundane and I think that's someone's whole job well you know in some cases I think we have to adapt to what's happening fewer patients are dying and it's because our clinicians are able to pay more attention to the patients who need it our goal is for AI to enable us to provide more human-based care the big thing with AI and this is the confusion behind it AI is only as good as the knowledge that you give it like you saying with the medical staff and
then how you ask you actually ask it the questions of the people who are giving it the answers without it it's just something I can tell you how many cows in the world like it's it's really not as powerful as people think okay so so Jeff McPherson everybody here I think an AI shark is not a terrible phrase for you okay because because you go into businesses and help them understand how to work with AI what I am curious about though because I know you have questions CL and and Martin as well as a writer
and as an illustrator when you hear of the sorts of jobs that are on the AI chopping block Unfortunately they pop up on the list all the time so yeah we are the prime targets so what what goes through your mind when you hear of sort of it could save lives the efficiencies what I'm hearing is that these things are all really great but it is early days and I do kind of have a caution where I think you know all the more reason to examine the possible consequences and regulate them as quickly as we
can on because sometimes when you have a new innovation it can get out ahead of basically the sober second thought that we rely on so much here in Canada um personally I'm a fantasy writer I have four novels and a novella out and I'm here to tell you that every single one of them has been scraped by chat GPT so what do you mean by that what I mean is is that content every single word of those books that basically base my livelihood off of um has been scanned by a computer every single word of
those books is inside the language model of chat GPT let's say somebody wanted a sequel which I'm not currently planning to write they could go to chatgpt and say hey write me a sequel to the midnight bargain and when that happens what happens to me when was the first moment that you thought AI might be coming for me as an illustrator uh when people started making entire children's books over a weekend using chat GPT to write it and uh you know Imaging AI to make illustrations for it what are you afraid of in this moment
um I'd like to still have a job next year basically I see AI as being a really good tool that could be used art wise if you need prompts for say I need to I need to draw a cityscape from a bird's eye view you know I can prompt that into Ai and you know give me an idea of a starting point let's say so then I could keep creating but the problem right now in this industry is that it's almost treating art as if it's a problem the only problem that we're having is because
of greedy CEOs you know a money you'll make millions and millions of dollars but they want to make more money so they'll cut the artist completely that's the problem it's it's hard to get to get on board at this point and it's moving so fast and there's zero regulations copyright issues like you're saying there's none none how long is it going to take for the government to even think about this it should be used as a tool but unfortunately in the art industry it's being used as a replacement completely have you been replaced I don't
know um yeah I didn't get as many contracts last year is it because because buddy decided to do it himself with with the AI I don't know in a generation from now why would you want to become an artist why would you want to become a writer if a computer could just do it we'll do it for money we do it because we like right [Laughter] at the end of the day that's what it's for the efficiency the productivity to put profit in all of our pockets that's that's what it's for if it can help
you do that it's gonna it's gonna make people happy it it is going to happen and it is happening right now are we talking subjectively in the creative in the creative world writing and art yes 100 but from his point of view it's super powerful so how can you pick AI being one side a pro but the other side of calm because it could be going after your jobs it's like is it discouraging yes but you actually now have the ability to become a prompt engineer is what it's called to be able to create I
want to be an artist but that's just where the industry is going so I don't find that a very good argument because there's nothing to adapt to me writing in three four prompts to make an image is nothing nothing there's nothing to learn which I disagree that's why these prompt Engineers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year but then are we all going to go back to school to learn this you don't need to the years I think um the approach we take is um more around I think these emerging concepts of responsible
AI so this is where we have our clinicians where we have our patients we have people say this is what's acceptable to us this is what's not acceptable to us and that kind of sets the parameters around how we develop you know it's supposed to read just had a poll recently suggesting that Canadians are among the least likely people in the world to feel I guess confident or or feel that um AI is going to make their lives better I'm curious about you Jeff because what is happening when you walk into a business like how
are you perceived and what are you doing we're not there to be like hey we're going to replace the whole thing but there's an opportunity if people can't keep up with decisions that we build in each department that you may not be there so somebody can be a writer we can take a hundred of their past blogs or emails that they've written put it into the AI and it will spit out new blogs as well as change language as well that's just on the email marketing side same thing with customer service same thing with sales
call centers and stuff like that do I have empathy to the fact that it can take people's jobs yes but there's an opportunity for experts like yourselves to get ahead of it so you can be a part of it and that's where super powerful again I don't want to do that that's not why I do it and that's unfortunate because it is going to come I feel like it's invalidating us as humans right it literally takes years to get good enough to do what we do have you been in a position where you say you
know we're not going to do that because there are human beings here many times um there there are areas where I believe we can actually reduce Staffing for example through efficiencies that we can gain from AI Solutions using things like natural language processing to scour through notes and actually collect the information we need efficiently or we could cut staff probably by about 20 to 30 would be my estimation but is that the right thing to do I don't think it is how long is the ethical decision going to be the one that wins today this
is why we I think it's important for society to drive Ai and not the other way around is is society driving I mean do you think the ethical decision will be the in any industry no matter what it is there's good and bad it's just which one can overpower the other is is the big thing in the business world that we're in it comes down to the bottom line and businesses as they grow that number needs to get larger while things start getting cut and they're going to implement AI just because it's it's cheaper faster
and it's scalable okay so we need more faith in humanity here yes that's that's going to be the tough thing to look okay I'm going to call time here for a second because the problem is very clear the solutions less so this is why Armenian is is standing by watching our means going to come in and talk to us about a path forward here okay Armenian um if you haven't already met is an economist with a specialty in the future of workers uh I know you were listening in and I'm you know we're talking about
a writer and an illustrator here these aren't the only industries that need to be asking this question right 100 it is terrifying to see the possibility of a creative Force taking over human creativity I get it but it is happening everywhere in every industry as Jeff mentioned it's happening to coders it's happening to translators it's happening to Engineers it's happening to people working in law what strikes you about what you heard here so far this version of Technology as you've said a couple of times Martin is evolving very rapidly and in a way that is
human-esque and its ability to almost think we're not there yet but we might be moving there faster than anybody has anticipated in fact never before in history have we been less sure of our predictions of what is about to happen which means we should be much more cautious about how we are approaching it but that makes it harder to regulate because it is usually regulation happens after something terrible has happened and now we can't even predict what the terrible thing that could be that could happen nobody's thinking about the security aspect of AI because there
is going to be the bad AI like we've talked about but there needs to be the guard against the bad AI coming and there's going to be people who are going to be building bad AI to be able to replace jobs scam people stuff like that 100 have you had you it's a great ly lay off anybody I mean I I personally know but we wanted to businesses where yes customer service they're no longer there writers they're no longer there sales people no longer there so your technology that you have been asked to bring into
a company has in an in fact led to higher unemployment in those companies correct okay I just want to be clear that that is one purpose of this technology is to be labor replacing correct it is also to the good doctor's point labor enhancing I have been through in my personal life as an economist three waves of the robots are going to eat all of the jobs and at the end of every wave of debate and existential handwringing we have had more jobs but this Rodeo is different you would say though if if I made
Dr mondani that that it's not just labor enhancing in this context is it is it going too far to say it's it's life-saving we have a patient in the ICU right now where it's a really unfortunate situation that patient was bounced to three hospitals three hospitals before she came to ours and she had an intracranial hemorrhage or a brain bleed uh missed unfortunately and and all you know nobody can point fingers and say why didn't you do X or Y it's just that's how the Health Care system works we have an algorithm that detects brain
bleeds in less than 30 seconds using AI had that been available deployed the right steps taken she may not be where she is today so can I just double down on this what is the data we are feeding these machines on we'll Define and what is the purpose to which we are asking the machines to solve problems for us we'll Define who gets hurt who gets helped I I would love more regulation but I fear that we don't know how to do it that the technology is evolving too quickly that's one issue that the ownership
of the technology is by such large corporate entities and a company in North America may say put the brakes on that doesn't mean a company in Russia or China will absolutely correct and we are competing with everybody on who and what is going to control this technology that we are developing as Humanity around the world in real time I'm curious about at this level you know depending on where you are in your career yeah what on Earth do you do somebody asked me the other day I have an 18 year old that's thinking about going
into coding it's like is AI going to eat his future and my answer was would you have said that to an accountant somebody that wanted to study accounting when we introduced the hand calculator of course not it's a tool that made everybody's jobs easier and faster awesome AI could code we should all especially young people should be much more conversant about technology in a world that is dominated by technology we as humans are still in charge of the machines that might not last longer if we all throw our hands up and say it's six months
yeah right like if that's what we're saying give it six months it'll come it'll come faster if we give up control at our hospital we we have a saying that is you know not ours it's we've heard it from others is that AI is not going to replace clinicians but clinicians who use AI are going to replace clinicians who don't use AI if you have I don't know between three and six years left in your career or six to ten years or 20 years left what should you be doing if you're at each of those
stages it's actually the 25 to 54 year olds that really need to up their game and of course universities and colleges and high schools should be teaching every child everything they know about every generation of this technology because it is changing fast and learn how to use it so it isn't used against you I mean Martin Ciel Dr mamdani Jeff thank you very much
