{"id":7011,"date":"2025-07-18T19:30:41","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T19:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=7011"},"modified":"2025-07-18T19:30:41","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T19:30:41","slug":"watching-where-and-how-youre-walking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=7011","title":{"rendered":"Watching Where and How You\u2019re Walking"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By MIKE MAGEE<\/p>\n

In a speech to the American Philosophical Society in January, 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer<\/a> said, \u201cWe have made a thing \u2026that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world\u2026We 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/a><\/p>\n

As he explained<\/a>, \u201cWe\u2019ve 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\u2026Now we have a new industry that generates intelligence\u2026you can use it to discover new drugs, to accelerate diagnosis of disease\u2026everybody\u2019s jobs will be different going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe reinvented computing for the first time since the 60\u2019s, since IBM introduced the modern computer architecture\u2026 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\u2019s able to think\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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)<\/a>. The US has the largest number of closed circuit cameras at\u00a015.28 per capita<\/a>, in the world. On average, every American is caught on a closed circuit camera 238 times a week<\/a>, but experts say that\u2019s nothing compared to where our \u201csurveillance\u201d society will be in a few years.<\/p>\n

The field of FRT is on fire.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Emergen Research\u00a0<\/a>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\u00a0277 unique organizational investor groups<\/a>\u00a0offering \u201cbreakthroughs\u201d in FRT with an average decade of experience at their backs.<\/p>\n

But FRT, as amazing and disturbing as it is, took a back seat last week to David Ignatius<\/a>\u2018s Washington Post article titled \u201cHow the spy game will work when there\u2019s no place to hide.\u201d In the opening sentence\u00a0 he shares the 2018 warning of a CIA case officer who states with confidence, that \u201ccomputer algorithms would soon be able to identify people not just by their faces, or fingerprints, or DNA \u2014 but by the unique ways they walked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wild eyed speculation? Apparently not. In a Cornell scientific publication<\/a> 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 \u201cno place to hide.\u201d<\/p>\n

A moment of reflection is all it should take to appreciate that the distance between a spy\u2019s cover<\/em> and tradecraft <\/em>and our own day to day privacy and secrecy (including health related information) is narrow indeed. Consider former CIA director, Gen. David H. Petraeus<\/a> words in 2012, \u201cWe have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. \u2026 Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent and probable behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirteen years later, Ignatius<\/a> asked last week, \u201cWe\u2019ve entered a new era where AI models are smarter than human beings. Can they also be better spies? That\u2019s the conundrum that creative AI companies are exploring.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as no one knows better than Nvidia\u2019s 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 \u2013 security, e-commerce, automobile licensing, banking, immigration, airport security, media, entertainment, traffic cameras \u2013 and now health care with diagnostic, therapeutic, and logistical applications leading the way.<\/p>\n

Machine learning and AI have allowed FRT to displace voice recognition, iris scanning, and fingerprinting. And now \u201cgait recognition\u201d (plus data tracking) can theoretically uncover the identity of even masked face ICE agents in one of their LA children\u2019s park raids.<\/p>\n

Still Jensen Huang sees this revolution as both manageable and progressive. He said last week, \u201cA lot of work will be automated (but) it\u2019s going to create new work, new jobs\u2026AI is the \u2018great equalizer\u2019\u2026because we use AI for research\u2026as a tutor\u2026so that I may be\u00a0 better informed in a lot of different fields that I otherwise am relatively new at\u2026its a booster for young people and puts pressure on people like myself\u2026.every programmer just became better because they have the benefit of AI, every researcher just became better\u2026every 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\u2026they all have access to the world\u2019s best AI\u2026its actually a great equalizer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does anything keep him up at night? How about the fact that\u00a080% of undergraduates in China<\/a>\u00a0go on for a Masters degree? And this while we\u2019re handcuffed in recruiting the best overseas minds by tariff and visa wars and targeted attacks on our premier universities.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the\u00a0Hill & Valley Forum<\/a>\u00a0in Washington, D.C. on May 1, 2025, Huang\u00a0 stressed the importance of maintaining an innovation lead in controlling the risk\/benefit endpoints of this technologic revolution.<\/p>\n

His concerns? 1) Already more than 50% of the world\u2019s 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 \u201cfull speed ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular correspondent to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America\u2019s Medical Industrial Complex<\/a>. (Grove\/2020)<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By MIKE MAGEE In a speech to the American Philosophical Society in January, 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, \u201cWe have made a thing \u2026that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world\u2026We have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7011"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}