Authors
Dr. Edward Longe
Director of the Center for Technology and Innovation, The James Madison Institute
Turner Loesel
Technology and Innovation Policy Associate, The James Madison Institute
Sal Nuzzo
Senior Fellow, The James Madison Institute
Executive Summary
Florida stands at a critical juncture in healthcare, facing unprecedented challenges as its elderly population surges. By 2045, the state is projected to have over 8 million residents aged 60 and above. As the state’s elderly population grows, it will further strain an already burdened healthcare system with increasingly costly and complex health needs. This demographic shift and existing shortages of physicians and nurses demand innovative solutions to ensure quality care for Florida’s aging population.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative tool to address these challenges, offering immense potential for all aspects of elderly care. AI applications allow providers to deliver better care, from early disease detection to combating loneliness. Despite the promise of AI to transform and improve elderly healthcare and wellness, regulators and legislators risk imposing burdensome regulations that could prevent the benefits of AI in elderly healthcare from being fully realized, reducing the quality of care and the quality of life for senior citizens.
Introduction
Most Americans’ first formal interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) came in November 2022 when Open AI released ChatGPT, a generative AI program that could respond to prompts and generate text. Since then, most prominent technology companies have released their own programs, such as X’s Gork, Google’s BARD, and Meta’s LLaMa. Before ChatGPT, Americans had unknowingly interacted almost daily with AI programs such as Siri or Alexa, which used a Deep Natural Network (DNN) “to convert the acoustic pattern of your voice at each instant into a probability distribution over speech sounds.” While these consumer-facing AI programs are new, the foundations of AI date back to 1956 when American mathematicians, led by John McCarthy, proposed a study to “find out how to make machines use language from abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans and improve themselves.”
Since 1956, the capabilities of AI have grown beyond what the founding fathers of the technology could have imagined. Advancements in data availability and algorithmic processing power has led to significant improvements in predictive text and content recommendation technologies. These tools provide medical professionals with various applications to enhance patient care while reducing costs in an era of escalating healthcare expenses.
Read “Silver Tech: AI’s Golden Opportunity for Florida’s Aging Population” here.
