Maverick's Update

“Smile… though your heart is breaking.” It just so happened that we walked by Radio City Music Hall on Friday, July 21, 2023, which is the location of Tony Bennett’s last performance — not knowing that it was the very day he went to sing with the angels. It isn’t easy to express the impact he had on generations of music lovers and music-makers, but that didn’t stop everyone from trying. The thought of Tony Bennett gives us pause about the high-tech evolution of our society because Tony Bennett had nothing to do with it. To the contrary, this widely-revered, immensely talented giant painted his art by hand, sang his songs without technical support, and won a Grammy for MTV’s “Unplugged” performance. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, we explain why — like the sad loss of Tony Bennett — some healthcare public policies are making it difficult for people to smile.

Other news items this week that did not make us smile:

• The Sequoia Project published a report of findings from its Consumer Voices Workgroup demonstrating that barriers still stand in the way of seamless health information exchange.
• China is probably going to win the artificial intelligence race, according to experts cited in a recent Axios article. Microsoft president Brad Smith said: “No one in the United States should ever underestimate the speed at which the Chinese economy, including in the private sector, or even the state-owned enterprises, deploy new technology.”
  • Pause here for a Tony Bennett quote: “The bottom line of any country is: what did we contribute to the world? We contributed Louis Armstrong.”
• In a report released this week, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the Center for A.I. Safety in San Francisco showed how anyone could circumvent AI safety measures and use any of the leading chatbots (including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard and Claude, a chatbot built by the start-up Anthropic) to generate nearly unlimited amounts of harmful information.

One Thoughtful Paragraph