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- [00:00]
Zach or Laura
What is it about Australia that just hits different? Australia is where we shared our first kiss, where we fell in love. That was 18 years ago now. And this is what, your fourth trip back.
- [00:12]
Fareed Zakaria
Australia has this incredible way of drawing you back.
- [00:14]
Zach or Laura
The ocean, the people, the oysters. So good, so briny and delicious. And the possibility of exploring something new. Learn more about Zach and Laura's journey@australia.com or and start planning the vacation of a lifetime.
- [00:31]
Fareed Zakaria
This is gps, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you live from New York. Today on the program, after Friday's talks between the US And Iran, is a new nuclear deal possible? I'll talk to Wendy Sherman, who led the US Side of the negotiations that led to the last deal with Iran, plus journalist Kim Gaddaf then. Tuesday will mark four months since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began. But all is not quiet on that Middle Eastern front. More than 500 thousands have been killed in that time, including at least 24 on Wednesday alone. And a true peace seems very far away. I'll talk to former CNN correspondent Arwa Dayman about the state of play Gaza today. Finally, how will AI change our health, our lifespans? Will it cure diseases previously thought to be incurable? I'll bring you a great discussion with three key thinkers on this topic. But first, here's my take. We all sense that the world is entering a more uncertain phase. Alliances feel shakier, trade is fragmenting, and great powers are jostling more openly. But beneath these visible shifts lies something less discussed and more dangerous, the slow collapse of nuclear stability. For much of the Cold War, people were terrified that a world with nuclear weapons would inevitably lead to proliferation and that wars would end up nuclear. After all, rarely in human history has a weapon sat unused in arsenals. But that is what happened. The arsenals remained, but they were bound by treaties, habits and doctrines about restraint. Arms control agreements capped numbers. Deterrence relationships were relatively clear. Proliferation was constrained, if imperfectly, by norms and pressure. It was not a safe world, but it was a stable one. That era might be at an end. The clearest marker was the expiration this week of new Start, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia. There are now no legally binding limits on the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. For the first time in more than 50 years. Some hope this will be a brief interregnum, and efforts have begun to find a successor agreement. But the broader context is not encouraging. When New Start was signed in 2010, it reflected a different world. Russia's strategic forces were aging. China's nuclear arsenal was small and oriented toward what was called minimum deterrence. Now, as Eric Edelman and Franklin Miller write in Foreign affairs, that world no longer exists. Russia has modernized roughly 95% of its strategic nuclear forces, at least according to President Vladimir Putin. More worrying, Moscow has built a vast regional nuclear arsenal. Experts estimate some 1,500 tactical weapons deployable from land, air and sea. These systems fell outside New Start altogether during the war in Ukraine. Putin has repeatedly invoked nuclear threats, engaging in a SC game of nuclear blackmail. China's trajectory may be even more consequential. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China possessed roughly 240 nuclear warheads. Today it has more than 600 and is on track to reach 1,000 by 2030, according to US estimates. China is fielding a full nuclear triad land based missiles, ballistic missile submarines and air launched weapons, and moving toward more regular, high alert levels, including the capacity for launch on warning launching while an adversary's missiles are still in the air. The Biden administration sought to slow this buildup through dialogue, pressing Beijing to enter nuclear arms discussions. The response was blunt. China would seriously talk only when its arsenal matched more closely that of the US and Russia. As Edelman and Miller note, the Beijing views transparency and verification not as confidence building measures, but as vulnerabilities. Arms control is seen as a constraint to be avoided. The result is a three sided nuclear competition, far more complex than the bipolar standoff of the Cold War. The Economist captures the shift with a vivid image. What Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb once called two scorpions in a bottle has become three, the bottle more crowded, the scorpions less predictable. This matters because deterrence grows more fragile as the system grows more complex. A bipolar nuclear world was dangerous but legible. A tripolar or multipolar one is not. Russia and China are cooperating more closely, exchanging technology and conducting joint military exercises, sometimes involving nuclear capable forces. A bipartisan US Strategic Posture Commission warned in 2023 of the risk of opportunistic aggression or even coordinated pressure across multiple theaters. American nuclear forces, designed for a largely bilateral rivalry, weren't meant to deter two peer adversaries simultaneously. Arms races are dangerous. Numbers creep up. Doctrines blur. The risk of miscalculation rises not just in war, but in crises, exercises or moments of panic. Modern nuclear systems are increasingly entangled with cyber networks, space based sensors and compressed decision timelines. A false alarm or misread signal can escalate far faster than in the past. The danger doesn't stop with the major powers. According to the New York Times, about 40 countries have the technical skill to produce nuclear weapons. For decades, non proliferation rested on a bargain. Most countries would forego nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees or the promise that nuclear states would manage their arsenals responsibly. Both pillars are now under strain. As doubts grow about America's willingness to protect allies consistently, some are quietly reassessing their options. In South Korea, debate about acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent has moved from the margins toward the mainstream. In Japan, once unthinkable discussions are now whispered among strategists. If such moves begin in Northeast Asia, they will not end there. We are drifting from managed deterrence to its competitive rearmament, from limits toward accumulation, from predictability toward improvisation. For decades, we lived under the shadow of the most powerful weapons in history and learned imperfectly how not to use them. That achievement is a landmark, but may prove to be fragile and temporary. Go to faridzakharia.com for a link to my Washington Post column this week. Next on gps US And Iranian officials meet in Oman on Friday for talks over the future of Tehran's nuclear program. Is an agreement in the offing, or is another US Attack on Iran more likely? We'll tackle that next.
- [08:52]
Zach or Laura
What is it about Australia that just hits different Australia is where we shared our first kiss, where we fell in love. That was 18 years ago now. And this is what? Your fourth trip back? Australia has this incredible way of drawing you back. The ocean, the people, the oysters. So good, so briny and delicious, and the possibility of exploring something new. Learn more about Zach and Laura's journey@australia.com and start planning the vacation of a lifetime. I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.
- [09:25]
Claire Duffy
This week on the podcast Terms of Service, Americans bet around $150 billion in total on sports in 2024. And that means for individual betters, there can be serious money on the line, too.
- [09:38]
Fareed Zakaria
I wanted to dig into how these.
- [09:39]
Claire Duffy
Apps work and their impact on users, and that's why I invited Harry Levant into the studio. Harry is a gambling counselor, and he serves as director of gambling policy with the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University.
- [09:54]
Fareed Zakaria
With online gambling and apps immediately accessible.
- [09:57]
Zach or Laura
On your phone, we have normalized and.
- [09:59]
Vasanth Narasimhan
Now we deliver a known addictive product.
- [10:02]
Fareed Zakaria
At light speed in partnership between the.
- [10:04]
Vasanth Narasimhan
Gambling industry, the sports leagues, media and the tech companies.
- [10:09]
Claire Duffy
Listen to CNN's terms of service wherever.
- [10:12]
Zach or Laura
You get your podcasts.
- [10:16]
Fareed Zakaria
On Friday, the US And Iran held high level but indirect talks over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. The meeting came less than eight months after American bombers and submarines attacked three nuclear sites in Iran. And as American might musters around, Iran prepared to strike at the president's behest earlier today, Iran's top diplomat pushed back on international pressure the by saying that Tehran reserves the right to enrich uranium. The issue has been a major sticking point between Iran and the US let's bring in today's panel to discuss this. Wendy Sherman was the lead negotiator in the Obama administration when the U.S. and other powers negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran in 2015. And Kim Gaddas is a Beirut based journalist who is a contributing editor to the Financial Times. Wendy, you know, as it turns out, Arachi, there was Kerry and you and Zarif and Arachi. So the current top negotiator for Iran is the guy you negotiated with for, I'm assuming, hundreds of hours. What do you think of him? And just bottom line, does it look like a deal is possible or likely?
- [11:28]
Zach or Laura
So Abbas Arachi is a really tough and capable negotiator. He knows every inch of Iran's nuclear program and quite frankly, everything else in Iran. He has bona fides with the supreme leader because he was part of the revolution in 1979. So he is quite a match for Witkoff and Kushner, who certainly don't begin to know the level of detail that Arachi does. So I think this will be a very tough go for Witkoff and Kushner. And the president, as we all know, likes to have a quick and swift victory. That will not happen here. This is a tough negotiation. They have to be ready for it. I do think that it's important always to have a credible use of force on the table to put pressure on. The administration is doing that. But nonetheless, this is hard. The president has to decide what he wants and war is absolutely on the table.
- [12:30]
Fareed Zakaria
Kim, you say in the Financial Times that It feels like 45 years of lessons with the US and Iran are being sort of packed into this one negotiation. Explain what you mean.
- [12:46]
Kim Gaddas
Well, the US And Iran have been, you know, enemies and foes for 47 years. And if you add Israel to the mix, then over the last four decades, five decades as well, Israel has been at odds with Iran through its proxies, whether Hezbollah in Lebanon or Shia militias in Iraq, but of course also Hamas, a partner of Iran. And both the US And Iran have learned a lot of lessons about how to deal with Iran. But they have not figured out yet how to bring these negotiations to. To a conclusion or which Israel would like to see how to bring down the regime in Iran. But Israel has deployed its firepower and its technical prowesses over the last two years, since October 7th to decapitate and diminish a lot of Iran's regional capabilities. And you can see that there is perhaps a strategy. I don't want to be too positive in terms of giving credit, too much credit to the Trump administration at this stage. There is more knowledge on the table how to negotiate under pressure, how to approach it than we've seen in the past. But I agree with Wendy. It's not impossible to see a deal come to fruition, but war is definitely still on the table.
- [14:10]
Fareed Zakaria
Wendy, the key issues, it seems to me, are this issue of enrichment and the ballistic missiles. And I want to ask you whether you think there is a possible compromise there. For example, could you, you know, could the Iranians say we will not enrich underground? Because that's hard to strike. You know, overground enrichment is an easy target. Is it possible you could limit the range of the ballistic missiles? What do you think?
- [14:37]
Zach or Laura
I think there are all kinds of compromises. The question is what is acceptable to the Trump administration and Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, who's quite a hawk on this, believes that any deal has to come to Congress. It's interesting he thinks the deal has to come to Congress, but going to war doesn't have to come to Congress. So I think there's a lot here that is possible, but it's really whether the Trump administration, under pressure from Israel, as Kim has pointed out, decides that it will take a deal. The president, as we all know, took us out of the deal that President Obama, Secretary Kerry, Secretary Clinton and I and a huge team of people in the US Government negotiated. So whether he's prepared to do this is important. One technical point, Fareed, much of the world believes that the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty gives countries the right to enrich for civil purposes. The United States has long believed it is not a right, but President Obama said he would consider it under intense verification and monitoring that was in place. That's all now gone. Those technical details would be very critical to any decision, including really having verifiable, transparent knowledge of their ballistic missile program and being able to constrain it. There's lots to be done here. You don't want one element to be negotiated against the other. This is going to take time. The question is, is President Trump ready to take that time?
- [16:16]
Fareed Zakaria
Kim, I was in the region last week. And what I was struck by was the general feeling that both the rulers of the UAE and of Saudi Arabia had cautioned President Trump about massive strikes on Iran, that he was kind of opening up a Pandora's box, that the regime could, you know, morph into a military dictatorship. It could collapse in Syria fashion. That seems like a change in policy where the Gulf Arabs used to be very hawkish. Is that a sign that Iran is now so weak they are not as concerned about it?
- [16:55]
Kim Gaddas
I think they are relieved to see that Iran has been cut down to size to some extent over the last two years. And I think they're very concerned about the possibility of a strike that could either lead to collapse, chaos, civil war inside Iran. It's a country of 90 million people. This is a region where countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are very focused on building their economies. But also they're concerned that a strike would not lead to a conclusive removal of the regime of the Islamic Republic, that it would not be a coup de grace, and that it would, in fact, leave in place a regime that is even more vengeful and ready to lash out not just at the US but also at countries in the region. So weighing all of this is crucial in the days ahead. It is also weighing on the minds of Iranians. Of course, they're stuck between the US on the one hand, and Israel and their own regime on the other hand. And they're worried both about war and what it could mean for them on a day to day basis, chaos, civil war, as I said. But also if there is a negotiated outcome that leaves in place the regime that is also, you know, a very, you know, terrible outcome for the Iranian people who have protested for so long now to try to get rid of this regime.
- [18:24]
Fareed Zakaria
Yeah. Wendy, tell us about what you think the regime's ultimate, you know, goal also is because they, at some level, you know, they don't mind the sanctions. People have pointed out that the Revolutionary Guard runs the black markets. And so it doesn't mind the sanctions. It controls the smuggling. You know, do they really want, do they benefit from some level of hostility vis a vis the United States?
- [18:55]
Zach or Laura
They do to some extent, Fareed. But the truth is the vast majority of their population is under the age of 35. Those young people who can get on the Internet through various means don't see a future for themselves, don't see jobs and ways to raise their family. They see how others in the world operate, and they want that as well. And the regime understands that. It has to manage this in a way that allows the theocracy to stay in place. This really horrifying regime that killed thousands of people. This is a very repressive, oppressive, oppressive regime that is willing, as we've just seen, to kill anyone necessary to be able to stay in place. And Kim is quite right. If in fact there is war, if in fact somehow the supreme leader is taken out, it is most likely that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the really, really right wing, right wing doesn't even begin to explain it. Who controls the economy in Iran will take charge and we will see an even more repressive regime if one can imagine it in place. So there is a lot at stake here. And we've got American negotiators who are trying to also negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine, trying to negotiate Gaza and its future, which you'll talk about further. It is unimaginable to me that two people, neither of whom really have the experience, don't apparently have a team behind them who understands all the elements here, can get this all done all at once.
- [20:37]
Fareed Zakaria
Wendy Sherman, Kim Gaddas, thank you so much for joining us. Next, what is going on in Gaza when we come back. On Wednesday, a series of Israeli strikes on Gaza killed at least 24 Palestinians, including a number of children and women. Israel says the strikes were in response to Hamas militants attacking its soldiers. In all, more than 500 Gazans have been killed since the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began four months ago, according to Gaza health officials. Next steps in the Trump peace plan include rebuilding Gaza and the demilitarization of Hamas. But how can you get there from this wobbly ceasefire? Joining me now to discuss is Arwa Damon, a former CNN correspondent and the founder and president of Inara, a charity organization to support children impacted by war. Arwa, welcome. It's still very hard to get much information. People can't go into Gaza. So what I want to know from you is four months after the ceasefire, what is the condition for the children of Gaza? You know, have their lives improved?
- [21:52]
Claire Duffy
It's extraordinarily difficult, Frieden. I'm in constant contact with our INADA team members on the ground there. And I actually just spoke to our program coordinator, Yusra a few hours ago and I was asking her how she was able to basically feed and support her own two little boys. And she was saying that it's still quite hellish. Even someone like her who has a stable income struggles to be able to provide her own kids with sufficient nutrition. You go out onto the market and you can find plenty of soda and chocolate and candy, but you'll struggle to find a proper source of protein. And for the vast majority of the population, they can't afford the frozen chicken or meat when it actually does show up on the market. We're not really seeing the expected or even close to the expected frame flow of humanitarian assistance into the Strip, whether it's food items or more crucially at this stage, shelter items, given the rains and the horrific flooding that was happening. Keeping in mind that when we talk about flooding in Gaza, we're not just talking about rainwater flooding, we're talking about sewage. Sewage is mixed in with that rain water because the sewage system in Gaza is broken. We're talking about hospitals that still don't have adequate medicines. And we talk a lot about the impact on the children, but there's also a devastating impact on the elderly and their capacity to be able to reach medical treatment when they do need it. And so for the majority of the population, this is very much not a ceasefire, nor are they really all that optimistic that the next step of this so called ceasefire is actually going to be implemented.
- [23:31]
Fareed Zakaria
And you have children dying of hyperthermia, you have, as you said, these sewage systems flooding. My understanding is there is no sewage system. So what we mean is people are digging holes and then those the floods are obviously making, you know, destroying them.
- [23:51]
Claire Duffy
Exactly. And that causes, you know, widespread disease, understandably. There's also not enough hygiene kits. And so, you know, bare minimum, you know, a parent tells their child to wash their hands, especially if they running around outside. Well, how do you do that if you don't have. So, and then add to all of this, there was a lot of fanfare around the reopening of the Rafah border crossing and a lot of people were really anticipating that that would cause some sort of a significant push towards, at the very least, something in their lives beginning to look a little bit better. But that's really not what has materialized. Farid. If we look at the numbers that are. Border crossing has now been open or partially open for roughly a week. There were supposed to be 50 people off of the medical evacuation list of nearly 20,000 allowed to exit every single day, along with two relatives each. So far, total, we have seen less than 40 people permitted to exit. Why is this so critical? Why is this so important? First of all, as many people will know, it is because Gaza's health system is utterly decimated. But also people who are not accessing medical evacuation are dying during a period of seven months. Last year, more than 1,000 people awaiting medical evacuation died because they weren't getting the treatment that they need. And so there is a sense inside Gaza, at least, that this opening of the Rafah border crossing was just a media stunt, that it's very performative and that really the ultimate sort of aim that this Trump peace plan claims to have, which is improving conditions on the ground in Gaza, that that's not really the ultimate objective.
- [25:44]
Arwa Damon
Wow.
- [25:45]
Fareed Zakaria
A very sobering report. Thank you, Arwa. We're gonna check in with you from time to time to see whether things are getting better. Thank you. Next on gps, we can see how AI is transforming the way we live, but what will it do for how long we live? AI and healthcare is our topic. Fascinating panel when we come back. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast.
- [26:14]
Kim Gaddas
It's not about knowing that exercise is.
- [26:16]
Zach or Laura
Good for you, that's gonna necessarily motivate.
- [26:18]
Kim Gaddas
You to exercise, but there's a lot.
- [26:20]
Zach or Laura
Of inner barriers, psychological barriers to moving our bodies.
- [26:24]
Fareed Zakaria
That's Dr. Diana Hill. She's a psychologist, and she's also co authored a really interesting book with biomechanist Katie Bowman. It's called I Know I should exercise but 44 reasons we don't Move and How to get over them. 44 reasons. Specifically, we're gonna talk about a lot of those reasons and how to motivate yourself to move your body. Listen to Chasing Life streaming now. Wherever you get your podcasts. AI is poised to transform entire industries, none of them more consequentially than medicine. AI is already helping doctors detect fractures, triage patients, and flag early signs of disease. But in the future, the expectation is it will be able to do much more, from developing new therapies to helping us eradicate entire diseases. At Davos, I moderated a panel with three people who, in different ways, are working on the future of AI. Vasanth Narasimhan is the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Novartis. James Manika is the senior vice president of Research Labs, Technology and Society at Google and Alphabet. Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT. Here are the highlights of our conversation. So, Vahas, I'm going to ask you, if you were to imagine 10 years from now, what would an average person's interactions with AI and medicine in biology look like? And how would it make that person's life or experience with medicine different?
- [28:04]
Vasanth Narasimhan
Well, Farid, you know, I actually think that I hope a patient doesn't even know that AI was behind what they're seeing. I mean the biggest opportunity, and you think about it in the long run is can we tackle diseases that we've been unable to tackle before? When you think about the work actually we do with James team in Isomorphic Labs, what we send them are what we call undruggable targets. So these are things we were unable to solve with traditional approaches to drug discovery for disease, diseases that don't have good solutions today.
- [28:34]
Fareed Zakaria
And even though we don't realize that about 90% of the diseases we've identified don't have a solution, most diseases still.
- [28:43]
Vasanth Narasimhan
On the planet don't have great medicines and many diseases are just undertreated. I mean, all we're doing is basically putting off the continued progression of the disease, but eventually the disease progresses. And so if AI can start tackling those big problems and then a picture patient 10 years from now, they just get a medicine. They get a medicine that's hopefully coming to them faster, more efficiently, but a medicine that would have never existed if we didn't have these AI tools.
- [29:09]
Fareed Zakaria
Early detection is another thing people always talk about with AI. Why will AI help with early detection?
- [29:17]
Arwa Damon
Well, it turns out that there's so many other signals that we can latch onto to do early detection. One example is something called diabetic retinopathy, for example, where by taking retinal scans, turns out you can learn a lot about other diseases, everything from cardiovascular diseases and a whole range of other things. And we also noticed that in fact there's so many other diseases like tuberculosis for example, where something like 40% of people in the world go undiagnosed and question is, how do you diagnose that? So it turns out AI is actually very good at diagnosis of things that are often missed. So we're now doing be able to, we've shown and design peer reviewed journals work, show that a whole range of cancers you can, colorectal cancer, breast cancer and so forth, you can actually do slightly better early detection using AI tools. So diagnosis and detection is actually one of the, in some ways I think one of the best uses of current capabilities that we should be applying AI tools too.
- [30:18]
Fareed Zakaria
So Vas, is, is it fair to say that the image we have in our heads when you think about this is you go to the doctor or you go to a lab, they do some kind of a full body scan or they take your blood and 10 years from now because of AI, they're going to be able to tell you way more than you know, they'll say, oh, you're going to, you, you know, you're going to get cancer in six years. You're going to, you're going to, you have, you have, you know, this issue, you have that issue. Let's try and fix all of them now. Is that the reality we think we're moving towards?
- [30:48]
Vasanth Narasimhan
I think for many diseases, we're going to be able to, as James points out, detect much, much earlier. But the real opportunity is we know that you get better health outcomes, the earlier intervening diseases. So if you want to stop cancer, very difficult to stop a cancer once it's spread around the body. But if we can detect a cancer before it's even become a tumor and then start to treat it, the patient may never get cancer. Similar things with many other cardiovascular disease, renal diseases. So the real opportunity is to marry early detection with this new era in drug discovery and then really ask ourselves, can we eliminate some of these diseases from humanity?
- [31:24]
Fareed Zakaria
So, Andy, when you listen to all of this, you know, stepping back and taking the kind of big picture, what is the effect you think AI will have on the healthcare industry?
- [31:37]
Andrew McAfee
Yeah, I share my, my panelists and two guys who I've learned a lot from. I share their deep optimism about the timeframe that you just outlined, the next 10 years. And the reason why I say that is we finally have a toolkit in this current era of AI that's going to let us make progress on problems that we don't understand. I always think of a quote from a biologist of the 20th century, which I love. He said, it's not that nature is more complicated than we understand. Nature is more complicated than we can, can understand. It's insanely complicated. Now we have the set of technologies, call it generative AI, where if we just feed it a whole bunch of stuff, it can do a remarkable job of figuring out the rules, figuring out the structure, figuring out what's going on underneath the hood. Right now we have large language models which for the first time ever have given us the ability to have technologies that are completely fluid with human languages and, and effortlessly and accurately translate among them because they've understood the structure of language. We didn't tell it that structure. Great. Now swap out large language and put in large disease, large drug, large genetics model. We're going to put different things in the large model in that middle word. And I'm excited about it. So when we talk about 10 more years of this kind of progress, our ability to intervene early, effectively change cheaply and deal with these diseases like dementia, where we've made so little progress, I'm not saying we're going to crack it, but our odds have just gone up, not by a little, but by a lot.
- [33:12]
Fareed Zakaria
Next on gps. Could AI replace your therapist? And what would that mean for you, but also for society as a whole? I'll explore this with the panel next. Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, sees two areas where the use of AI in medicine is particularly providing therapy to people who are struggling but cannot afford a human therapist and more broadly, diagnosing human diseases better than humans themselves can. But what would these kind of innovations do to employment in medicine? At a panel at Davos last month, I asked Vasanth Narasimh, the CEO of Novartis James Manika, senior vice president at Google and McAfee Vas. Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, says picking off of what Andy was saying about the diagnosis is always going to be better from the computer than the human being, which makes sense. The computer is looking at, you know, 50 million cases. The human being can remember 5,000 at best. He says in the future, nurses will be paid more than doctors, which is a provocative way of saying that the human touch side of the profession will be paid more than the brainiac side, which is sort of analyzed. Do you buy that?
- [34:41]
Vasanth Narasimhan
Well, I don't know about the nurse first, Doctor, but what I do know, what I do believe, and I think the data supports this, is that still humans need to sense empathy. And you sense empathy from other, other humans. There's probably microfacial elements, there's voice. And in the end, empathy is what creates trust. And so no matter how far we go with the AI generated models, I'm skeptical that we can replace that human element of trust. People always ask us, why do you still need 25,000 sales representatives around the world visiting doctors? So we did the experiment. We said, let's try to use algorithms, let's try to use digital engagement tools. None of it works because at the end of the day, when you're trying to have a physician change their behavior in order for them to treat a patient who's putting their trust in that physician, they need to trust the person delivering the message. So you can enable that sales rep with AI tools. But the physician needs to feel trust, and that only comes from that human human interaction. So actually, it's interesting. We're not going to reduce our sales forces at all. We're going to give them AI tools, but we need them even more to cut through all of the technical noise to build that relationship.
- [35:51]
Fareed Zakaria
So, Andy, back to you on this issue. Of what does this do to the healthcare industry? Because it cannot be that it will massively increase productivity without reducing headcount. In other words, these are basically two sides of the same coin, correct?
- [36:08]
Andrew McAfee
No, not necessarily. Let me give you another path, which is that we can do a lot more health care with the same population. For example, I was just looking at the data. James and his fellow hyperscalers, these companies right at the frontier of AI, are still growing their workforces. Even though they have access to the absolute best tools to automate the heck out of software engineering and skyrocket the productivity of people, they still have a lot of people. Why? Because they're in a nasty competitive battle with each other and they're able to do so much more per day that when the competition is always also doing a lot more per day, backing off on that is a really bad idea.
- [36:46]
Fareed Zakaria
Let me push you on that. You say there's a mental health ki. Counselor. Right. That you're going to introduce. I know of an agentic nurse, a company that has put forward an agentic nurse and same thing. There are not enough nurses in the world. There's no question, however, that you are puncturing the price umbrella. You are, you know, your nurse, your health care counselor costs $1 an hour.
- [37:09]
Andrew McAfee
Yeah.
- [37:10]
Fareed Zakaria
Whereas the human one costs 50, 70 and 100. You know, you are, you are lowering the price.
- [37:17]
Vasanth Narasimhan
Yeah.
- [37:17]
Fareed Zakaria
Which has to have an effect on employment. Right.
- [37:22]
Andrew McAfee
Econ one way. Hold on. Econ 101 says another thing that might happen is you'll increase demand for the service when the price craters. Well, you can do a lot more health care if it costs a lot less as you're doing a lot more health care. I think there's a high likelihood that you'll still need to involve people in that role. Did I get the Econ 101 right?
- [37:42]
Arwa Damon
No. I was going to make a similar point, but let me make it in a different way. What do most people say about their experience going to the doctor? I was rushed in there. I spent 10 minutes with my doctor. They were busy on a keyboard and we talked for a few minutes and I was out of there.
- [37:59]
Andrew McAfee
And I filled out a piece of paper before I walked into the office.
- [38:03]
Arwa Damon
Right. So I think one of the exciting possibilities here is not so much a reduction in personnel and so forth, but actually a shifting of how people spend their time. Think about the amount of. Of time and that there's been studies that have looked at this that are counting the amount of keyboard work that's being done when you're in front of your doctor or somebody behind the scenes. So think about doing away with all of that and actually allowing the time to build the kind of trust that Vas was talking about. I think this could, this is one of the things that could actually transform healthcare and think about making that available to everybody except beyond just people in this room.
- [38:41]
Fareed Zakaria
Andy, when you think about the broader kind of societal implications of these kinds of things, do we have any parallels to look at that help us understand what people are going to be doing? You know, it's always, it's famous people say about technology, you can never predict the kind of jobs that are going to be created. And I think that's exponentially true of AI.
- [39:05]
Andrew McAfee
You have asked if there are historical parallels. One thing that I notice very clearly is that every time one of these extraordinarily powerful technologies comes along, every time there's a new general purpose technology that's going to transform our economies and societies, one thing that happens is a societal level freakout led by the elites about massive looming technological unemployment. It happened with the steam engine, happened with electrification, happened with the mainframe. You can just watch it happen over and over again. Meanwhile, what we continue to underestimate when we think about the phenomenon of creative destruction, we continue to underestimate the creation part, which is what you're talking about. And these tools are going to be used by innovators and entrepreneurs to do things that we literally cannot sit here and imagine what the world is going to be like 10 years hence. I still have some confidence that they're going to need people to help them realize those visions. Employees, people, co workers, and get them out there in the the world.
- [40:00]
Fareed Zakaria
Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.
- [40:08]
Zach or Laura
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- [40:36]
Fareed Zakaria
Lifetime news cycle making your head spin. The have I got News for you Crew is here to help with a comic take on the week's headlines. New episodes Saturdays at 9 on CNN and next day on the CNN app.