Becoming Ever More Human in the Looming Age of AI

“I want to suggest that one of the worries about robots that you hear about a lot—and it’s a legitimate worry—is that robots are going to take our jobs.”

Kevin Kelly, sat comfortably on a common stool, drops this quasi-dystopian bomb on an inspired, tech-savvy crowd at a SXSW lecture. You can almost feel the tech professionals and geek culture enthusiasts squirming at his feet. Older in age and softened by the confidence of his wisdom, the Wired Magazine co-founder acknowledges the likely future calmly, but with a furrowed brow. You know instantly that he’s about to challenge mainstream reactions.

The tech prophet admits that the quickening growth of artificial intelligence is one of the “12 Inevitable Tech Forces” that title his highly anticipated new book. More and more is it seemingly impossible to refute—a signifier of a shifting zeitgeist that today can hardly be challenged. We can look at Boston Dynamics, who are creating androids so human-like in movement that it’s almost disturbing. Our hairs stand on end when you watch the Atlas model get knocked forwards off its feet, consciously come to all fours, and slowly stand back up. More confounding still is the spectacle of the four-legged Spot model stumbling sideways like a startled young deer, successfully staying on its feet with an animalistic, panicked response. Kelly also explains that other models, who can “learn” from colleagues, have a steel foot in the door. They harness the technology of recognizing visual patterns, and are able to watch a human perform a simple performance and repeat it on their own, leapfrogging pre-programmed code that relate to individual tasks.

Still, Kelly stands (or sits, rather) in defiance, and points out that such machines of basic intelligence can move in only to occupy spheres of “efficiency.” In considering the nucleus of contemporary business being cemented in just that (consider our desperation for fast wifi alone), how does a brand get ahead when ubiquitous, salary-independent tech makes everyone move at the same speed?

As Kelly calmly and prophetically explains, the advantages for brands simply shift to new areas. Differentiation, with human efforts being booted out of old-school, industrial efficiency, will become more dependent on the things humans could only ever do. That means creative solutions, emotional empathy, artistic innovation, and highly tailored content.

Take an example from my long-beloved arena of healthcare—a hypothetical hospital where the near-perfect accuracy of A.I. is responsible for anything from routine surgery to changing the sheets, and patient transfer to dosage adjustments. Doctors and nurses would, as expected, become more focused on patient relations, emotional intelligence, and fostering mental health—aligning with the actual experience of a hospital, instead of just running it. In the responsibilities of admin pushed to the side, staff would have much more time—and therefore more responsibility—to treat each patient in time, with care, and as an individual. These skills of hearing and reading, reserved for humans, are a hallmark for good healthcare.

Of course, the implications for PR/Comms professionals beyond the white walls are simply immense. As it has already happened to American agriculture, per Kelly’s reminder, we know that a rise in tech automation means a shift in human focus from efficiency to personality, and cold convenience to emotional engagement. Content and user customization will almost surely far transcend even its current importance, and direct human-to-human relations with consumers will be the key to staying personal in an increasingly binary world.

It’s brilliantly ironic to think that in freely adopting A.I., business could be more humanized than ever.

Music as Precision Medicine

What do Rock-and-Roll Hall of Famer Peter Gabriel, Grammy-Award-winning alternative artist Annie Clark (St. Vincent), critically acclaimed electronic musician Jon Hopkins and distinguished composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen all have in common?

Aside from the extraordinary range of musical talent they represent, all four have just announced they are joining The Sync Project, a Boston-based “global collaboration” asking some fascinating questions about how medicine might be different if we could more precisely harness the power of music to heal our bodies and our minds.

We all know, intuitively, that music can change the way we feel. As Peter Gabriel said when announcing his Sync Project collaboration, “A good collection of music has always been used as a box of mood pills.”

But what if music can actually change the way we heal? Plenty of current research suggests that it can, and that it does so in some of the same ways that medicines do – by modulating neurochemical pathways involved in reward, motivation and pleasure; stress and arousal; immunity; and social affiliation.

For example, a study of 7,000 surgical patients found that people who were allowed to relax to their favorite music had their pain levels drop by two points on a scale of one to 10, and needed less pain medication to feel comfortable. That’s a fairly impressive effect for a non-pharmacological intervention, not to mention one that is simple, inexpensive and free of side effects.

Music also has been found to aid in recovery after stroke, helping to improve verbal memory and focused attention, depression and confusion. Music appears to stimulate neural networks that bypass the area of the brain damaged by stroke, allowing recovery to take place.

The scientific literature is full of other examples but researchers themselves are the first to admit that study of the neurochemical effects of music is still in its infancy.

That’s where The Sync Project comes in.

They’ve built a platform to facilitate the first-ever large-scale studies to scientifically measure how the structural properties of music – beat, key and timbre – impact biometrics such as heart rate, brain activity and sleep patterns. The platform is leveraging converging technologies, including services like Pandora and Spotify that give anyone with a smart phone access to a nearly infinite variety of music, and the smartphones themselves, which can collect biometric data when synced with wearable trackers. This information will be used to generate large real-time data sets that can be shared with scientists and clinicians to help them perform rigorous studies with broad “real-world” applicability.

The Sync Project’s ultimate vision? To one day be able to deliver to a person’s phone a personalized soundtrack or “musical cocktail” for conditions like sleep disorders, pain, Parkinson’s disease, fatigue, stroke recovery, anxiety and athletic performance.

Music as precision medicine.

In a recent talk Sync Project co-founder and CEO Marko Ahtisaari asked, “If you knew that walking for five minutes to music could help someone with Parkinson’s disease, would you do it?” He said that later this year the company will be launching an open application enabling anyone to join and contribute data, with the goal of creating a large enough data set to better understand the musical characteristics that affect gait, a frequent impairment in patients with Parkinson’s and other movement disorders.

It will be fascinating to watch – and maybe even participate! – as this project progresses and provides yet another perspective on ways medicine can evolve to incorporate safer and more accessible, less invasive and less costly methods for monitoring, diagnosing and treating a wide range of conditions.

Creativity and the Power of Place

Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “People get the government they deserve” (something we might be thinking long and hard about after this election season is over). In a twist, former NPR international correspondent Eric Weiner makes the case that “societies get the geniuses they support” in his new book The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places, from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley. Or, as he quotes Plato, “What is honored in a country is cultivated there.”

Bear in mind that Weiner isn’t speaking only about the smarts that come with a high IQ. He’s talking about “creative genius.” He particularly likes how the artificial intelligence expert Margaret Boden defines it – the “ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising and valuable.” What Weiner is most interested in, though, is not just the how and the what of creativity, but the when and the where of it – which, as he points out, is a bit different from the approach many companies take when they set out, consultants in hand and workshops planned, to help employees “think more creatively.”

In a trip around the world and to some unlikely places, Wiener goes looking for “genius clusters” – places that throughout history have produced a “bumper crop of brilliant minds and great ideas.” What he finds is a lot like the terroir of a great wine region, with its unique combination of climate, soil, terrain and wine-making tradition. In the case of genius clusters, Weiner finds they have flourished in particular places at particular times when certain ingredients combine and attain critical mass. Ingredients like:

• Mentors. Think 1500s Florence, where Lorenzo Medici was the backer of a young stone cutter named Michaelangelo. Or late 18th century Vienna, a city that honored music and where Franz Joseph Hayden was mentor to both Mozart and Beethoven.
• Freshness. Later, in 1900s Vienna, the city was flooded with immigrants and open to new ideas. The likes of Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt and Leon Trotsky gathered in the city’s famous coffee houses to read newspapers from around the world and discuss big thoughts. The coffee houses were “third spaces” – neither work nor home, but places where people could gather interact with others who were different from them. Third spaces are important because, as Weiner says, “genius is contagious.”
• Chaos. Genius clusters also thrive amidst a certain degree of chaos – just enough to shake us out of old ways of thinking and stimulate new ones. Calcutta in the mid-to-late 19th century was one of the world’s great intellectual and creative capitals in the areas of art, literature, science and religion – a product, in part, of the chaotic “jolt to the system” caused by the forced intermingling of East and West cultures.
• Discernment. This ingredient is about the ability to separate good ideas from bad. In the late 18th century, Edinburg was the epicenter of the Scottish Enlightenment, an “age of reason” that, among other things, led to a surprising number modern medical advances and major contributions to the fields of chemistry, geology, economics, and philosophy. Today, Silicon Valley is a good example of discernment raised to a high art.

Talent, of course, is an essential element in all of this. But as Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard, has observed on this subject, “Genius is not really about individuals. It’s really about a collective. It’s about a community of practice.”

For creativity to bloom, ideas from even the most talented individuals require an environment where they can be shared and enriched. Find talented people, sure – but then clear the way and cultivate a space for them open up, collide if need be, and make great things happen.

Tuning in to Life’s Minor Characters

It was a shock to the baby boomer eco-system of a friend when her millennial daughter called her one night last winter and asked, “Have you been listening to that show on NPR?”

That show on what?

Was her daughter – the one who always moaned and groaned about listening to NPR on long car trips – actually sitting in her Brooklyn apartment and listening to a show on the radio? Not quite, of course. She was sitting in her apartment, yes, but she was listening to the latest installment of NPR’s ‘Serial’ podcast, the medium’s first runaway hit and a global sensation.

Fast-forward one year. Same daughter, home for the holiday. Binge-watching ‘Making a Murderer’ on Netflix.

Granted, both are murder mysteries. But murder mysteries are a dime a dozen; there are just so many episodes of ‘Dateline’ one can take. What ‘Serial’ and ‘Murderer’ are, though, are examples of pure storytelling at its very best. And as great writers will attest, meaningful, important stories can be told about almost anything…if you listen closely enough.

At a talk a few years ago at Boston University’s School of Communications, the legendary writer Gay Talese said that, in over a half-century as a journalist, “life’s minor characters often have the best and most meaningful stories.” He went on to say it takes curiosity – “not nosiness” – but a sincere curiosity, and the patience to get to know people. “They underestimate their own significance,” Talese said of ordinary people, “but you can walk a block and find stories by the dozen.”

General Electric has become a consummate corporate storyteller under the guidance of Beth Comstock. She’s currently GE’s first female vice chair with a new title leading Business Innovations. She was previously this mega-corporation’s chief marketing officer (CMO) and has spoken eloquently about how corporate storytelling can and should capture the imagination. When she spoke at the Future of Storytelling Conference in 2014 she began by asking, “How can you be memorable when you have very complicated things to talk about?”

This made me think of all the healthcare clients I’ve worked with, where answers are not always 100% certain but a path forward is being forged based on the dedication and untold hours and weeks and months and years of work behind the scenes. And of how, when asked and truly listened to, some of the most passionate storytellers are not necessarily the CEOs of these companies but the researchers behind the scenes who’ve devoted their lives to scientific discovery.

Echoing Gay Talese, Ms. Comstock said, “I think if you begin with the premise that your company can be a story teller, you find storytellers everywhere. I find some of our best storytellers are engineers. I think what you need to begin with is kind of a central group that’s good at translating and eliciting a passion in someone that gets them to tell their story.” She continued, “You are almost afraid to look at what you have. But when you embrace who you are and find an elegance and a beauty in it, it’s amazing where it takes you.”

Fittingly, GE is sponsoring a new award being presented for the first time at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2016 – the Tribeca X Award “to celebrate the best collaborations between filmmakers and brands.” It will be awarded “for works that exemplify the best that branded storytelling has to offer.” Jane Rosenthal, who co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival with Robert DeNiro, told AdAge that “for the past decade, a shift has taken place across traditional models of entertainment, art, and advertising, as brands step in to serve as financiers and studios, and become catalysts for high-quality, provocative storytelling.”

Storytelling is the most ancient of arts – and now one of the hottest buzzwords in the communications firmament. Storytelling has always been the heart and soul of how we, as communicators and as human beings, connect and persuade each other.

But today, as with the rise of the novel in the 18th century, it looks and feels like we have entered a new “golden age” of storytelling. Then as now, social and economic forces were at play. Technological advances (the printing press then, the vast media array at our disposal today) have increased the audience for a good story exponentially, in ways that are both old and new.

SuperGiggles, Aside?

The Superbowl is the Ad industry's annual pilgrimage to self-awareness. Few events act as much as a signifier of our hyper-contemporary habits: our living, thinking and acting. It's secular America's holy day, but as Ad Age put it, judgement day for many a firm or agency.

This year Ad Age summarized a shift in tone with great eloquence, simply that the Superbowl spots have become “fun again”. After a previous year of bittersweetness and quivering heart strings, to mindlessly laugh at the sheer weirdness of PuppyMonkeyBaby was a bit of a gift.

Yet while the jury is still out on whether this popular strategy will pay off—the window for skepticism stays open. When trying to motivate consumers, is a good laugh really enough? It’s thoughts like these that define judgement—moments where the pros soak in that time of the year and evaluate the current climate. We consider what needs to come next, and remind ourselves what an ad could—and should—be.

Individual markets and specific target demographics aside, it is impossible to deny that we live in a well-connected world spun by insatiable media hunger. To be on the Superbowl stage is the final frontier. To go viral is the holy grail. One ad can receive more engagement now, on more platforms, then ever before. It inevitably becomes soft propaganda—an art form that has the potential—and privilege—to define who we are as a modern consumerist society.

An ad can make a bottom lip quiver. It can make us appreciate the small things and remember the important things. It can amp you up until you’re white-knuckling the arms of your chair, or make you curl up in a ball on the living room floor at the bittersweetness of life itself. Its job is to push a product, but an ad can and might be the greatest cultural signifier and social utility that we have to work with. It’s more accessible than contemporary art, less intrusive than hardened propaganda, and more romantically fleeting than reams of journalism.

Capitalizing on this potential is something many of the greatest ad campaigns have in common. Think Johnnie Walker’s inspiring “Joy Will Take You Further” attitude, or Apple’s humble declaration as ambassador to connected humans. Red Bull hardly ever pushes a product, instead promoting a lifestyle of energy and accomplishment—not dissimilar to GoPro’s “Be a Hero” platform.

Ad Age’s top four Superbowl ads of all time (Feb 8, 2016 Issue) even share this trait of commenting on who we are and/or can be. “Farmer” by Ram Trucks, Budweiser’s 9/11 “Respect” tribute, Coca-Cola’s 1971 “Hilltop” spot, and Monster’s “When I Grow Up” all play upon some crucial elements of the modern human experience. Terrorism, career aspirations, work ethic, global harmony—all of them act as contemporary commentary, venerating the things that shape our societies. So when we ask ourselves if a good laugh is enough, it might be enough to go viral. It might be enough to be remembered, to be covered, to be talked about. It might be clever, creative, and well-executed, cute.

But do some ads get in their own way? Can they rise above a Super Sunday moment to bring real meaning over enough time for audiences to remember, care and act as intended?

Make Way for More Face Time, Less Screen Time in the Exam Room

Last month I wrote about it being a “zeitgeist moment” for physician-patient communication. And it is, with everything from healthcare reform to outcomes research reinforcing the centrality of the physician-patient relationship as the “heart and soul” of effective medicine, even in today’s fast-paced, high-tech healthcare environment.

But what an uphill battle it still can be.

The latest wrench thrown into the works has arrived in the form of electronic medical records. In general, of course, these are good things intended to support more efficient and effective patient care. But they’ve had unintended consequences – a major one being that computers are now taking up valuable physical and psychic real estate between physician and patient in the exam room.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a study by researchers at Northwestern University finding that doctors using electronic health records spent about a third of patient visits looking at a computer screen. This is not progress – and patients know it. According to another recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine, patients rated the care they received lower when doctors looked at a computer screen a lot during patient examinations.

Computers won’t be barred from the exam room anytime soon, nor should they be. However, as Indiana University School of Medicine Professor of Medicine Richard Frankel, Ph.D. said in commentary accompanying the JAMA study, “The medical profession can ill afford not to develop and implement patient-centric, exam room computer-use best practices.” He has developed a model called POISED to remind physicians of best practices for computer use with patients:

• Prepare: Review electronic medical record before seeing patient
• Orient: Briefly explain how computer will be used during the appointment
• Information gathering: Enter data when with patients to show their concerns are being taken seriously
• Share: Show the computer screen to patients so they can see what has been typed, signaling partnership and also serving as a way to check that what is being entered is what was said or meant
• Educate: Show patients graphic representations of information over time, such as patient's weight, blood pressure or blood glucose
• Debrief: Use 'teach back' or 'talk back' format to assess the degree to which the patient understands recommendations or instructions

“Communication” is multi-layered. It is not just about what is said but also about what is perceived. Skilled doctors are alert not only to what their patients tell them but also to the more subtle signs they notice when looking at someone – affect, pallor, posture, function, etc. These things can convey a great deal that patients might not explicitly say. New technologies in the exam room need to be judged based on their potential to bolster or short-circuit this crucial aspect of the physician-patient relationship.

A “Zeitgeist Moment” for Improving Physician-Patient Communication

While the debate about drug costs rages on – whether we’re talking about innovative new ones or the more recent trend of turning decades-old, inexpensive drugs into high-priced “specialty drugs” – it is worth considering the value of lower-tech approaches to improving patient outcomes and controlling healthcare costs.

Like talking.

Recently, for example, a rigorous, landmark study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) concluded that schizophrenia patients who took part in a program that emphasized talk therapy and family support while keeping dosages of antipsychotic medication as low as possible (to minimize side effects) had better outcomes after two years of treatment than patients who got the usual drug-focused care.   

This isn’t a one-time finding. A huge amount of global evidence has built up over several decades demonstrating that better communication between physicians and patients improves health outcomes and reduce costs. The NIMH study was based on an approach called Open Dialogue, first developed in Finland in the 1980’s for people diagnosed with psychoses such as schizophrenia. It emphasizes early intervention that includes listening, collaboration and support for the individual's network of family and friends, rather than relying solely on medication and hospitalization. “These are zeitgeist ideas,” said one of the experts quoted in the New York Times piece about the study. And indeed they are.

The Institute of Healthcare Communications (IHC) was an early initiative here in the U.S. that had its start nearly 30 years ago, as an initiative for Bayer (then Miles Pharma). Its aim was to spearhead a push for better physician-patient communication. The value of this work was validated early on in a very dollars-and-cents way, when clinicians who took part in IHC workshops were offered discounts on their malpractice insurance. Insurers saw first-hand that breakdowns in physician-patient communication were – and still are – at the root of many malpractice suits.

Today, not only insurers but many medical schools, health systems and hospitals are engaged in focused efforts to improve communication between patients and their healthcare providers. The impetus for this has come from many places over the last three decades. Recently, one of the more forceful kick-in-the-pants has come from Medicare, which in 2012 began reducing reimbursement to hospitals with poor performance on patient satisfaction scores, 30-day hospital readmission rates, and other metrics where it’s been shown that improving physician-patient communication can make a huge difference in outcomes and costs.

There have been and continue to be challenges. Lack of time (or the perceived lack of time) to attentively listen to patients is almost always blamed for the failure to communicate. A newer wrinkle has been introduced with electronic medical records, the maintenance of which requires a clinician to look at a computer screen rather than the patient for large chunks of the limited time they are in the same room together.

The bottom line, though, is that our healthcare system still rewards “doing” – prescriptions, procedures – over listening and talking. With drug prices unlikely to go anywhere but up for the foreseeable future, we have a social responsibility to make room for the low-tech, high-touch methods that we know can deliver more cost-effective and patient-centered care. It’s time to accelerate translating that knowledge into widespread practice.

Elizabeth Holmes and the Case for ‘Breakthrough Simplicity’

Photo Courtesy Theranos

Elizabeth Holmes, the 31-year-old CEO of Theranos and the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, may (or may not) be the next Steve Jobs-esque wunderkind, attempting to apply his brand of elegant, user-friendly design to medical diagnostics. What she says her company can do may (or may not) thoroughly disrupt the medical diagnostics industry. But she clearly has the unfettered courage of her conviction that her company’s technology, by making blood testing simpler, will do nothing short of making the world a better place.

Ms. Holmes has devoted her entire life – quite literally, it seems – to the passionate belief that blood testing can be more easily and cheaply done in ways that are better for patients, physicians and the healthcare system as a whole. But recently the Wall Street Journal published back-to-back investigative pieces raising doubts about whether Theranos is really doing what it says it does – that is, quickly and inexpensively processing a full range of laboratory tests from just a few drops of blood obtained from a simple finger prick. So far, despite her ardent defense of her company and its achievements, many feel she has not effectively addressed the tough questions raised.

It may very well be that Theranos has encountered challenges with its potentially game-changing technology and hasn’t been open about it. But there’s no doubt Ms. Holmes is aiming for something at the very heart of today’s healthcare conversation – how do we simplify the vast complexity that characterizes healthcare today? How do we reduce the barriers that make it difficult for patients to get what they need?

It’s been called “breakthrough simplicity” – an alternative way of thinking about innovation that is rooted in finding new ways to make everything simpler. The more complex something is, the greater is the opportunity to simplify it. Healthcare is a good example. Every bit of data out there is telling us that healthcare doesn’t work the way it should – not for consumers and patients and not for healthcare providers, either. The system gets more complicated by the day while people want and need it to be simpler to navigate so they can get the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their care.

But “simple” doesn’t necessarily translate to “easy” when it comes to the innovation needed for this kind of fundamental change. Complexity builds on itself until it becomes entrenched and the accepted way of doing things. Change is hard. Systems resist. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes.

Whether or not Ms. Holmes ultimately succeeds, she’s planted a stake in the ground for innovation of the “breakthrough simplicity” kind – the kind that cuts through the clutter and focuses on the true essence of what consumers need and want.