Episode 4: David Usher - reimagining healthcare

Loneliness in the elderly, why we don't play chess with AI and what digital memories can teach us about ourselves Welcome to the North of Patient podcast - conversations on health[beyond]care - where we paint an inspired landscape of healthcare's future through dialogues with creative and unconventional thinkers from around the world. For a summary of the episode, visit the ⁠blog post⁠ on North of Patient: https://open.substack.com/pub/puneetseth/p/episode-4-david-usher-reimagining and subscribe to ⁠North of Patient on Substack⁠: https://puneetseth.substack.com/ This week’s episode features music legend and creative AI visionary, David Usher. David is an artist, best-selling author and entrepreneur. As a musician, he has sold more than 1.4 million albums, won 5 Junos and has had #1 singles singing in English, French, and Thai. He is also the CEO and founder of Reimagine AI, an artificial intelligence company building AI-powered virtual beings and virtual being technology in entertainment, retail and healthcare. David has a degree in political science from Simon Fraser University and his book on creativity and innovation, Let the Elephants Run • Unlock Your Creativity and Change Everything, is out now. As you can expect, this was an animated conversation touching on many subjects. We talk about augmented reality, Apple Vision Pro and creating our digital representations, and in fact what it would be like to interact with the memories and likeness of our loved ones, as David created with his LucyAI collaboration. We talk about the generative AI gold rush, what we can learn from our mistakes in social media and how to steer our efforts towards positive outcomes. And of course, we talk about Reimagine AI and David’s personal story for wanting to tackle isolation and loneliness in the elderly. Key stamps from our conversation are below: 00:21 Intro Monologue - David Usher 02:16 Transitioning from music to entrepreneurship 06:19 ReimagineAI 08:58 Loneliness in the elderly 11:42 Drawing lines between digital and human being 13:20 Empathy in AI vs humans 16:33 AGI and human abilities 18:53 Looking at change from micro and macro perspective 24:11 On social media 26:20 Can human imagination help us navigate what's next? 27:26 Lucy AI 30:39 Exploring what it means to be a person 32:23 On Apple Vision Pro and memories 37:24 How LLMs will influence how we see the world 41:14 Why we only want to play chess with humans