The beginning of a new year is a great khbrknews to imagine new possibilities, both for ourselves and for the world. And this year, as Sam Altman put it while accepting the 2023 Stephen Hawking Fellowship at Cambridge: “We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It’s an exciting yet precarious place to be.”
At the moment the AI conversation is focused on how to align AI with human values. But the possibility I’m most excited about isn’t how AI can become more human — it’s how AI can help humans become more human. It can do this in two ways — one is very personal, and the other collective and universal.
Let’s start with the personal. The last few decades have been a golden age in behavioral science and the science of well-being. We now know that every aspect of our health is deeply influenced by five foundational daily behaviors: sleep, food, movement, stress management and connection. Not only do these behaviors impact our health, they’re also critical if we’re going to move the needle on chronic diseases, which continue to increase in unsustainable ways. At the moment, the focus of AI in healthcare is on diagnostic and drug development innovations, which are of course significant and transformative. But for most of us, health is what happens between doctor visits.
Yes, behavior change is difficult, but a lot of recent science and data show that it is absolutely possible when done right. The key is to base the process on tiny, incremental, daily changes that cumulatively become healthier habits. As Dr. Kevin Volpp, Director of the Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, and Alisa Camplin-Warner, a two-khbrknews Olympic medalist, wrote in a paper about what elite athletes can teach us about healthier behaviors: “Coaches try to break goals down to a point that the first levels of goal achievement are almost guaranteed… Psychologists call this goal gradients—the idea that people work much harder to achieve goals that are seen…
