Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the edge of my consciousness as a great hope for solving many of the problems in clinical medicine for maybe a decade. In 2011 IBM created a program called Watson which was able to answer questions in plain English and search data sources for answers quickly enough that it beat 2 humans in a game of Jeopardy. After its success in a game show, the program was used to make a chatbot to help people buy diamonds, to write recipes for Bon Appetit and by various financial firms to increase profits. It also has healthcare applications, including diagnosis and treatment recommendations as well as decision support for imaging. But that's just Watson, which isn't the big name in AI right now. ChatGPT came out in 2018 and by 2021 it was available to users. Last year I signed up for it and used it a little bit for what it seemed to be good for. I tried asking it questions, mainly medical ones, and I used it a little bit to generate text to explai
The earliest cases of the novel coronavirus seem to have been in Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan in China, possibly in November of 2019. The virus shares a family name with other more common viruses that are known to cause upper respiratory infections, such as the common cold. I won't go into Covid's origins, other than to say that there has been lots of obfuscation about them and I look forward to seeing the original streaming video series of the pandemic in about 5 years when perhaps the truth will be accepted fact. I first heard about this new virus before I went to South Sudan for the last time in early 2020. I wasn't worried. There had been flu pandemics in my lifetime and we had muddled through. How bad could it be? People were starting to wear masks in the airport, which I thought was silly. As it spread to western Washington state, it looked like it might be more serious than I had predicted. Then it got awful in Europe, then finally the US became a disaster of