Topline
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday told attendees at the Make America Healthy Again Summit that artificial intelligence could help address key health issues and can offer a “better-informed” second opinion than doctors, as the prominent vaccine skeptic once again railed against public health experts and COVID-era response strategies.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argued that AI could help address public health challenges without asking people to “trust the experts.”
The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images
Key Facts
Speaking to Vice President JD Vance in a “fireside chat” to close out the MAHA summit, Kennedy argued AI offers the capacity to solve the “most daunting public health problems that are otherwise existential.”
The health secretary said that during a recent meeting, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told him that two years ago he wouldn’t have told anyone to take medical advice from AI, but now it would be “malpractice” to make a diagnosis or issue a prescription without checking with the technology.
Touting AI’s ability to digest thousands-page-long medical records, Kennedy claimed it can give you “a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country.”
Kennedy said another change he expects AI to bring is that health policymaking will never again be dominated by public officials “who tell us ‘Trust the experts.’”
Kennedy said every American will be able to check their own medical advice and argued that AI had the capacity to “free us from medical tyranny.”
crucial quote
“If somebody tells you, ‘Masks work, trust the experts,’ A.I. may tell you otherwise. If somebody tells you, ‘Social distancing works, trust the experts,’ A.I. may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, or you need to take it to protect your grandmother, A.I. may say it actually doesn’t do that,” Kennedy said.
Tangent
Earlier this month, Politico reported that the MAHA summit has several corporate sponsors including the country’s two leading artificial intelligence companies, OpenAI and Anthropic.
What did Vance Say About AI?
When Kennedy asked Vance about his take on the matter, the vice president joked that he might be at the wrong summit, “I thought this was about weight loss and acid, not A.I.” On the potential risks of AI, Vance said most of the downsides are “all related to models that were literally trained to hack into your computer.” On how to deal with those risks, Vance said a “pretty standard product liability approach makes a lot of sense. If you create a product that harms people, you should suffer consequences for it.” The vice president, however, dismissed the more dire scenarios about human extinction or catastrophes and said: “I do think that we have been so dominated by the doomers and the cynics, and that it’s going to be Terminator 2, and the robots are going to come and kill all of us, that we tend to ignore there are these amazing benefits to it.”
further reading
White House Releases ‘Accord’ Between Billionaire AI Execs: Here’s What It Says (Forbes)
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