Early Death

By MIKE MAGEE

In a speech to the American Philosophical Society in January, 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “We have made a thing …that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world…We have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power.”

Eight decades later, those words reverberate, and we once again are at a seminal crossroads. This past week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was everywhere, a remarkably skilled communicator celebrating the fact that his company was now the first publicly traded company to exceed a $4 trillion valuation.

As he explained, “We’ve essentially created a new industry for the first time in three hundred years. the last time there was an industry like this, it was a power generation industry…Now we have a new industry that generates intelligence…you can use it to discover new drugs, to accelerate diagnosis of disease…everybody’s jobs will be different going forward.”

Jensen, as I observed him perform on that morning show, seemed just a bit overwhelmed, awed, and perhaps even slightly frightened by the pace of recent change. “We reinvented computing for the first time since the 60’s, since IBM introduced the modern computer architecture… its able to accelerate applications from computer graphics to physics simulations for science to digital biology to artificial intelligence. . . . in the last year, the technology has advanced incredibly fast. . . AI is now able to reason, it’s able to think… Before it was able to understand, it was able to generate content, but now it can reason, it can do research, it can learn about the latest information before it answers a question.”

Of course, this is hardly the first time technology has triggered flashing ethical warning lights. I recently summarized the case of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). The US has the largest number of closed circuit cameras at 15.28 per capita, in the world. On average, every American is caught on a closed circuit camera 238 times a week, but experts say that’s nothing compared to where our “surveillance” society will be in a few years.

The field of FRT is on fire.

Emergen Research projects a USD annual investment of nearly $14 billion by 2028 with a Compound Annual Growth Rate of almost 16%. Detection, analysis and recognition are all potential winners. There are now 277 unique organizational investor groups offering “breakthroughs” in FRT with an average decade of experience at their backs.

But FRT, as amazing and disturbing as it is, took a back seat last week to David Ignatius‘s Washington Post article titled “How the spy game will work when there’s no place to hide.” In the opening sentence he shares the 2018 warning of a CIA case officer who states with confidence, that “computer algorithms would soon be able to identify people not just by their faces, or fingerprints, or DNA — but by the unique ways they walked.”

Wild eyed speculation? Apparently not. In a Cornell scientific publication on May 7, 2025, researchers using a model called FarSight were able to confirm human identity from 1,000 meters through gait assessment (among other measures) with 83% accuracy. For spies that operate in secret and hide their movement and communications at all costs, there is literally now “no place to hide.”

A moment of reflection is all it should take to appreciate that the distance between a spy’s cover and tradecraft and our own day to day privacy and secrecy (including health related information) is narrow indeed. Consider former CIA director, Gen. David H. Petraeus words in 2012, “We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. … Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent and probable behavior.”

Thirteen years later, Ignatius asked last week, “We’ve entered a new era where AI models are smarter than human beings. Can they also be better spies? That’s the conundrum that creative AI companies are exploring.”

But as no one knows better than Nvidia’s chairman, the bleed over of AI into human sectors is now near complete. Even before gait recognition, AI powered FRT technology was pervasive. They are everywhere – security, e-commerce, automobile licensing, banking, immigration, airport security, media, entertainment, traffic cameras – and now health care with diagnostic, therapeutic, and logistical applications leading the way.

Machine learning and AI have allowed FRT to displace voice recognition, iris scanning, and fingerprinting. And now “gait recognition” (plus data tracking) can theoretically uncover the identity of even masked face ICE agents in one of their LA children’s park raids.

Still Jensen Huang sees this revolution as both manageable and progressive. He said last week, “A lot of work will be automated (but) it’s going to create new work, new jobs…AI is the ‘great equalizer’…because we use AI for research…as a tutor…so that I may be better informed in a lot of different fields that I otherwise am relatively new at…its a booster for young people and puts pressure on people like myself….every programmer just became better because they have the benefit of AI, every researcher just became better…every doctor just became better because they had AI to help them do diagnosis. It could be a doctor in a small town, or a developing country…they all have access to the world’s best AI…its actually a great equalizer.”

Does anything keep him up at night? How about the fact that 80% of undergraduates in China go on for a Masters degree? And this while we’re handcuffed in recruiting the best overseas minds by tariff and visa wars and targeted attacks on our premier universities.

Speaking to the Hill & Valley Forum in Washington, D.C. on May 1, 2025, Huang stressed the importance of maintaining an innovation lead in controlling the risk/benefit endpoints of this technologic revolution.

His concerns? 1) Already more than 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese. 2) Their AI algorithms and codes are Open Source while ours are non-transparent and escape regulatory public/private scrutiny. 3) Our politics appear to backward facing and out of sync with technology which is “full speed ahead.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular correspondent to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)

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