Nvidia Wants to Replace Nurses With AI for $9 an Hour

[highplainsdem]

https://gizmodo.com/nvidia-wants-replace-nurses-with-ai-1851347917

Nvidia announced a collaboration with Hippocratic AI on Monday, a healthcare company that offers generative AI nurses who work for just $9 an hour. Hippocratic promotes how it can undercut real human nurses, who can cost $90 an hour, with its cheap AI agents that offer medical advice to patients over video calls in real-time.

“Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in healthcare, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at NVIDIA in a press release Monday.

Nvidia is powering Hippocratic’s real-time responses over video calls. In a demo posted by Nvidia, a semi-human-looking AI agent named Rachel verbally instructs a patient on how to take penicillin. The agent then tells the patient it will report back all this information to her real human doctor. Rachel is one of many AI nurses that healthcare providers can choose from, according to one of Hippocratic’s product pages. The AI nurses range in specialties from “Colonoscopy Screening” to “Breast Cancer Care Manager,” all for less than minimum wage.

Hippocratic directly promotes how it can undercut the living wages of real nurses as a feature, not a bug. One page of the company’s website compares a human nurse’s $90 per hour salary to an AI agent’s $9 an-hour running costs. Hippocratic claims its AI nurses outperform human nurses regarding bedside manner, education, and narrowly miss on satisfaction, according to a survey.

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The promo video:

EDITING to stress that this is using GENERATIVE AI, the type well known to make lots of mistakes while sounding very convincing.

And this will be advice offered in real time, without review by a human with expertise.

Found the story thanks to someone on Twitter who was outraged by it, as were the people responding to her. One of whom pointed out this probably won't mean any lower health care costs for patients, but will mean worse outcomes for them.