David Shaywitz, in his Forbes article, pulls out this great nugget of wisdom from Marc Andreessen about the challenge of applying AI to the VC business and compares it to AI replacing your doctor. I agree with David that it provides a tremendous insight into AI replacing the doctor.
Andreessen’s response (at around the 40-minute mark) speaks for itself–but also, I’d argue, for most in healthcare (emphasis added):
The computer scientist in me and engineer in me would like to believe this is possible, and I’d like to be able to figure this out–frankly, I’d like us to figure it out.
The thing I keep running up against–the cognitive dissonance in my head I keep struggling with, is what I keep seeing in practice (and talk about in theory vs. in practice)–like in theory, you should be able to get the signals–founder background, progress against goals, customer satisfaction, whatever, you should be able to measure all these things.
What we just find is that what we just deal with every day is not numbers, is nothing you can quantify; it’s idiosyncrasies of people, and under the pressure of a startup, idiosyncrasies of people get magnified out to like a thousand fold. People will become like the most extreme versions of themselves under the pressure they get under at a startup, and then that’s either to the good or to the bad or both.
People have their own issues, have interpersonal conflicts between people, so the day job is so much dealing with people that you’d have to have an AI bot that could, like, sit down and do founder therapy.
My guess is we’re still a ways off.
Who knew that developing data-driven tech solutions could be challenging in a profession that at its core is focused on human idiosyncrasies, especially under conditions of stress?
I love the description of the challenge as Human Idosyncracies. What’s interesting to me from a healthcare perspective is if we can generalize these idosyncracies in the way we treat patients.
