Gigaom AI Minute – October 31

Transcript

Artificial intelligence holds out the promise that it will be able to help us make great strides forward in treating illnesses. If history is any guide, treatments needed to prolong life, for instance, might be quite expensive. Meaning that the rich might live on while the poor die. There is an Italian proverb that states, "After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box." What if this ceased to be the case however? What if the consolation of the poor, that the rich die also, is upended?

Imagine if the poor continued to die while the rich lived on nearly forever. That might not sit too well with people. Even if death isn't eliminated, this is a problem we will undoubtedly see to some degree as life expectancies of the rich grow faster than the life expectancies of the poor. We see glimpses of this already with some extremely expensive drugs. There is no easy solution to this problem and our only real hope is that through technology we have breakthroughs that solve this problem.