Melbourne:(The Conversation) Last week, two big names in the artificial intelligence (AI) and wellness industries announced a collaboration to develop a customised, hyper-personalised AI health coach that will be available as a mobile app to reverse the trend lines on chronic diseases.
Sam Altman (head of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT) and Arianna Huffington (a former media executive who runs a high-tech wellness company called Thrive Global) announced their new company, Thrive AI Health, in a Time magazine advertorial.
Health is an appealing direction for an AI industry that has promised to transform civilisation, but whose huge growth over the past couple of years is beginning to look like it's stalling. Companies and investors have pumped billions into the technology, but it is still often a solution looking for problems.
Meanwhile, venture capitalists Sequoia and the investment bank Goldman Sachs are wondering out loud whether enough revenue and consumer demand will ever emerge to make this bubble feel more solid. Enter the next big thing: AI that will change our behaviour, for our own good.
Personalised nudges and real-time recommendations
Altman and Huffington say Thrive AI Health will use the best peer-reviewed science and users' personal biometric, lab and other medical data to learn your preferences and patterns across the five behaviours that are key to improving health and treating chronic diseases: sleep, food, movement, stress management and social connection.
Whether you are a busy professional with diabetes or somebody without access to trainers, chefs and life coaches the only two user profiles the pair mention the Thrive AI Health coach aims to use behavioural data to create personalised nudges and real-time recommendations to change your daily habits.
Soon, supposedly, everybody will have access to the life-saving benefits of a mobile app that tells you in a precisely targeted way to sleep more, eat better, exercise regularly, be less stressed and go touch grass with friends. These superhuman technologies, combined with the superpowers of incentives, will change the world by changing our tiny daily acts. Despite claims that AI has unlocked yet another innovation, when I read Altman and Huffington's announcement I was struck by a sense of deja vu.
Insurance that manages your life
Why did Thrive AI Health and the logic behind it sound so familiar? Because it's a kind of thinking we are seeing more and more in the insurance industry. In fact, in an article published last year I suggested we might soon see total life insurance bundled with a personalised AI life coach, which would combine data from various sources in our daily lives to target us with prompts for how to behave in healthier, less risky ways. It would of course take notes and report back to our insurers and doctors when we do not follow these recommendations.
In a related article, my colleagues Kelly Lewis and Zofia Bednarz and I took a close look at the theories of behavioural risk that might power such products. A model of insurance based on managing people's lives via digital technology is on the rise.
We examined a company called Vitality, which makes behavioural change platforms for health and life insurance. Vitality frames itself as an active life partner with [] customers, using targeted interventions to improve customer well-being and its own bottom line.