Tag: Loneliness

Why Sam Altman Cares So Much About Voice

Aug 12, 2024

By MIKE MAGEE

When OpenAI decided to respond to clamoring customers demanding voice mediated interaction on Chat GPT, CEO Sam Altman went all in. That’s because he knew this was about more than competitive advantage or convenience. It was about relationships – deep, sturdy, loyal and committed relationships.

He likely was aware, as well, that the share of behavioral health in telemedicine mediated care had risen from 1% in 2019 to 33% by 2022. And that the pandemic had triggered an explosion of virtual mental health services. In a single year, between 2020 and 2021, psychologists offering both in-person and virtual sessions grew from 30% to 50%. Why? The American Psychological Association suggests these oral communications are personal, confidential, efficient and effective. Or in one word – useful.

As Forbes reported in 2021, “Celebrity endorsements, like Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps’ campaign with virtual therapy startup Talkspace, started to chip away at the long standing stigma, while mindfulness apps like Calm offered meditation sessions at the click of a button. But it was the Covid-19 pandemic and collective psychological fallout that finally mainstreamed mental health.” As proof, they noted mental health start-up funding has increased more than fivefold over the prior four years.

Altman was also tracking history. The first “mass medium” technology in the U.S. was voice activated – the radio. He also understood its’ growth trajectory a century ago. From a presence in 1% of households in 1923, it became a fixture in 3/4 of all US homes just 14 years later.

Altman also could see the writing on the wall. The up and coming generations, the ones that gently encouraged Biden to exit stage left, were both lonely and connected.

The most recent Nielson and Edison Research told him that the average adult in the U.S. now spends four hours a day consuming audio and their associated ads. 67% of that listening was on radios, 20% on podcasts, 10% on music streaming and 3% on satellite radio.

Post-pandemic, younger generations use of online audio had skyrocketed. In 2005, only 15% of young adults listened online. By 2023, it had reached 75%. And as their listening has risen, loneliness rates in young adults have declined from 38% in 2020 to 24% now.

A decade earlier, screenwriter Spike Jonze ventured into this territory when he wrote Her. Brilliantly cast, the film featured Joaquin Phoenix as lonely, introverted Theodore Twombly, reeling from an impending divorce. In desperation, he developed more than a relationship (a friendship really) with an empathetic reassuring female AI, voiced by actress Scarlett Johansson.

Scarlett’s performance was so convincing that it catapulted Her into contention for 5 academy awards winning Best Original Screenplay. It also apparently impressed Sam Altman, who, a decade later, approached Scarlett to be the “voice” of ChatGPT’s virtual lead. She declined, seeing the potential downside of becoming a virtual creature. He subsequently identified a “Scarlett-like” voice actor and chose “Sky” as one of five voice choices to embody ChatGPT. Under threat of a massive intellectual property challenge, Altman recently “killed off” Sky, but the other four virtual companions (out of 400 auditioned) have survived.

As for content so that “what you say” is as well represented as “how you say it,” companies like Google have that covered. Their LLM (Large Language Model) product was trained on content from over 10 million websites, including HealthCommentary.org. Google engineer, Blaise Aguera y Arcas says “Artificial neural networks are making strides toward consciousness.”

Where this all ends up for the human race remains an open question. What is known is that the antidote for loneliness and isolation is relationships. But of what kind? Who knows? Oxford’s Evolutionary Psychologist Robin Dunbar believes he does.

Altman likely paid close attention to this review by Atlantic writer Sheon Han in 2021: “Robin Dunbar is best known for his namesake ‘Dunbar’s number,’ which he defines as the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. (The proposed number is 150.) But after spending his decades-long career studying the complexities of friendship, he’s discovered many more numbers that shape our close relationships. For instance, Dunbar’s number turns out to be less like an absolute numerical threshold than a series of concentric circles, each standing for qualitatively different kinds of relationships.… All of these numbers (and many non-numeric insights about friendship) appear in his new book, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships.”

But what many experts now agree is that voice seems to unlock the key. Shorthand for Altman: Pick the right voice and you might just trigger the addition of 149 “friends” for each ChatGPT “buyer.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex.(Grove/2020)

Succeeding in Fighting the Loneliness Epidemic

Jul 30, 2024

By JOSHUA SEIDMAN

In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy boldly declared that our country has a “loneliness epidemic.” In the Surgeon General’s public health advisory, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” he draws on decades of empirical evidence demonstrating the tremendous toll that loneliness has on people’s quality of life, and how it also increases the risk of premature death by 26%.

The question is: What can be done to tackle this intractable public health crisis? Perhaps even more pointedly, what is anybody actually doing that successfully reduces loneliness?

Steps Required to Reduce Loneliness

The first thing we have to do, as the Surgeon General said in his report, is “consistently and regularly track social connection using validated metrics.” Without ongoing measurement, we can’t even assess the problem, understand whether it’s getting better or worse, and know what interventions might be helping.

Furthermore, we need to tie those measurements to some sort of payment model. In order to focus providers and other stakeholders on the importance of loneliness, we need to hold them accountable for outcomes. Since we know that loneliness dramatically impacts both the quality and length of people’s lives, we should raise it as a priority for providers by tying some portion of their payment to their success in reducing loneliness.

We need to orient the health care system toward addressing factors that substantially affect the health of the population. Since the powers that be in the health care world accept smoking cessation as a valid performance measure, then it absolutely makes sense for payers and purchasers to hold providers accountable for addressing loneliness, a condition that the Surgeon General’s research equates to smoking 15 cigarettes per day.

Case Study of Success in Tackling Loneliness

Just as with any other proposed performance measure used to hold providers accountable, it’s fair to demand evidence that providers can actually influence outcomes for their patients. New research from Fountain House does just that —making clear that, with the right interventions, it is absolutely possible to measure and dramatically reduce loneliness in a way that meaningfully improves lives.

Fountain House pioneered the clubhouse model, a psychosocial rehabilitation model that supports people with serious mental illness (SMI). By addressing social drivers of health, we not only facilitate recovery, but we also reduce Medicaid costs by 21% relative to a comparable high-risk SMI population. An economic model we built also found that clubhouses reduce overall costs to society by more than $11,000 per person annually (when factoring in costs for mental and physical health, disability, criminal justice, and productivity/lost wages).

More to the point here, our population (and people with SMI generally) faces tremendous economic and social isolation and therefore are 2 to 3 times more likely than the general population to be lonely. Furthermore, research demonstrates that loneliness can be more intractable in the SMI population and failure to address it compromises their recovery and raises risk for an array of acute health events.

More on Loneliness as a Major Health Risk Factor

Mar 18, 2016

By TOM EMERICK

flying cadeucii One of the myriad reasons wellness programs are not performing well is that all humans have about 100 risk factors, of which obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol are only four. If those four are in pretty good shape but the other 96 are out of whack, don’t expect good health results.

Further, putting bandages on symptoms of metabolic disease has limitations. Such bandages do not address the root causes of metabolic syndrome. According to Wikipedia:

“Root cause analysis (RCA) is a method of problem solving used for identifying the root causes of faults or problems. A factor is considered a root cause if removal thereof from the problem-fault-sequence prevents the final undesirable event from recurring; whereas a causal factor is one that affects an event’s outcome, but is not a root cause.Though removing a causal factor can benefit an outcome, it does not prevent its recurrence within certainty.” (Emphasis mine.)

One thing sorely missing from most modern wellness methods is RCA. Unless one deals with RCA in metabolic syndrome it will continue to recur.

Some other huge health risks factors are job misery, terrible marriages, very poor money handling skills, envy, general lack of contentment in life, and loneliness. Another health risk is how far you live from a “dial-911-first-responder”. Yet another is how safe your neighborhood is. I could go on and on. Worksite wellness does nothing to address the vast majority of personal health risks. My book, An Illustrated Guide to Personal Health*, elaborates on such health risks.

assetto corsa mods