AI lovers ❤️
>>> Quick Picks - February 2022
Happy valentine’s day readers ❤️❤️❤️!!
I regret to inform you that after eating a very convincing fortune cookie in SLC last week (s/o Mandarin Garden in Sandy), I opened a metamask wallet, snagged @vickram.eth and set up a mirror.xyz. Dw, I’ll invite you all on my bridge destroying mega-yacht when I become a crypto-billionaire. NFT drop coming soon (haha jk…….. unless? 😳👉👈).
Hit my line if you’re in Orange County CA, San Diego or NYC in the next couple of weeks!
Stuff I’ve been thinking about:
Could AI companionship be the prescription for a looming loneliness crisis?
Stuff I liked lately:
⚕️ No Place to Get Sick - a must-read about healthcare in the Mississippi Delta. Great illustration of the harrowing status quo of rural health in the US
A series of studies analyzed by the Centre for Economic Policy Research last year found that when a rural hospital closes, the median distance for residents to access basic health services jumps by about 20 miles, and ambulance travel times increase an average of 76%. The death rate for time-sensitive conditions increases by 8.7%. The mortality increase is even higher for rural racial minorities and the rural poor—11.3% and 12.6%, respectively. The Mississippi Delta’s population is majority Black, and there’s no poorer place in America.
🍩 JAB and the Family Office Conundrum - deep-dive into KrispyKreme holding company JAB and how institutional family offices can think about incentive alignment
🇺🇦 Winter on Fire - re-watched in light of current events this week; still my favorite documentary ever
Coming Soon to Vick’s Picks:
The Advent of Decentralized Science
A Discussion on Specialty Urgent Care Models
If you’ve got thoughts on these topics, I’d love to hear them!
You Don’t Know Her, She Goes to Another Metaverse
I mused a few weeks ago that one application of the metaverse in healthcare is the use of digital companions to “treat” loneliness.
The connection between loneliness and health outcomes is under greater scrutiny as the aperture of what is considered “healthcare” expands. Food is healthcare. Transportation is healthcare. LOVE is healthcare!!!
This relationship between loneliness and health feels intuitive, but there’s also data to support it. For example, lonely people have 60% greater utilization of the ER, a fact that anyone familiar with 911 communication centers can attest to.
Social isolation and loneliness have also been identified as predictors of frequent ED usage (lacking close friends, living alone, unemployment, disability retirement, and subjective feelings of loneliness). [1, 30, 33, 38,39,40] These patients may also have emotional, cognitive, and stress-related neuroendocrine, cardiovascular and immune changes that contribute to difficulty managing their health. [40, 41] The increasing proportion of elderly citizens who live alone is another potential reason for recent increases in ED visits amongst the elderly.
Source: BMC Public Health Study - June 2019
While loneliness is pervasive across the population (the US Surgeon General has called it a nationwide epidemic), there are a multitude of drivers of loneliness - e.g. lack of friends/family/loved ones, general isolation due to life circumstances.
Let’s consider loneliness in just a romantic context, which is easy to double-click into from a data perspective. We are seeing a precipitous decline in marriage/partnerships rates. You might think that shift away from marriage is driven by people pursuing casual relationships. But that doesn’t appear to tell the whole story; for example, there is a rising rate of individuals reporting that they did not have sexual relations with a partner in the past year. The massive gap in college matriculation rates between men and women is likely to exacerbate these trends over the coming two decades. And this loneliness data is all pre-pandemic. A Harvard survey found that 61% of young adults reported feeling “serious loneliness” in Feb 2021, suggesting the pandemic has massively compounded an existing crisis.
It’s kind of dystopian, but there’s a reasonable case in which we could look to chatbots like Replika as digital therapeutics for loneliness. Mario Gabriele’s piece “Dating apps will scale beyond the human” provides some further discussion:
Though initially designed to serve as a virtual therapist, roughly 40% of the 500K monthly users harbor romantic feelings for their Replika. A quick scan of the 13.4K-strong Reddit group devoted to the app startles in its explicitness and tenderness…
Just like more traditional predecessors, the effect of Replika is scale, this time to such an extent that the terminology ceases to have meaning. Without humans, when love is made by a machine, refined in tandem with a human, scale becomes infinite. Homosapiens are non-fungible tokens, and as such, not copyable. If you love someone, you cannot create ten of them to please yourself. Technology has no such limitations; Replika’s love, in all its forms, can be endlessly copied and pasted and edited.
Future behavioral health protocols to treat loneliness could include this kind of “low intensity” digital therapeutic treatment as part of a broader treatment strategy. Kind of how good PT treatment protocols for MSK issues involve low intensity at-home stretching/exercise before moving on to higher intensity forms of treatment (e.g. surgery).
Maybe we leverage NLP technology to red-flag patients who exhibit signs of deteriorating mental health based on their conversation patterns with their chatbot partners and then steer them to higher touch care. Maybe the future Replika-like AI-lover-as-a-digital-therapeutic-app pulls in your dating app data, looks at who you swipe right on and generates your AI companion based on the type of people you like (à la Stitch Fix).
It sounds kooky at first pass, but the more you think about it, the less dubious it seems… after all, what IS love??
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