Mike Magee
In a January 1946 speech to the American philosophical society, J. Robert Oppenheimer said: “We have done something…that has changed the essence of the world suddenly and deeply…We have once again raised the question of whether science is good for mankind, whether it is good for the world to understand whether the world can understand it in order to try to control it to help obtain the world, thus making the world richer to realize its own strength, thus realizing its own knowledge.
Eighty years later, these words echo and we are once again at a groundbreaking crossroads. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is everywhere over the past week, a skilled communicator who celebrates his company is now the first publicly traded company to value over $4 trillion.
As he explained: “We essentially created a new industry for the first time in three hundred years. The last time there was such an industry, it was a power generation industry… Now, we have a new industry that generates intelligence… You can use it to discover new drugs to speed up the diagnosis of the disease… Everyone's job will be different.”
As I observed, Jensen performed on that morning's show, seemed a little overwhelmed, awe-inspired, and perhaps even feared by the pace of recent changes. “For the first time since IBM introduced modern computer architecture, we have reinvented computing … It is able to accelerate science from computer graphics to physics simulations to digital biology to artificial intelligence … The technology has improved rapidly over the past year. Get to know the latest information before answering questions.”
Of course, this is not the first time technology has triggered a moral warning light. I recently summarized the case of facial recognition technology (FRT). The United States has the largest number of closed-circuit cameras, with an average of 15.28 per person worldwide. On average, every American is closed cameras 238 times a week, but experts say that it's nothing compared to where our “surveillance” society will arrive in a few years.
The FRT field is on fire.
Emergen Research expects annual investment to be nearly US$14 billion by 2028, with a CAGR of nearly 16%. Testing, analysis and recognition are all potential winners. There are now 277 unique organizational investor groups that offer “breakthrough” in FRT, with an average of ten years of experience.
But FRT, despite this, is unsettling, again occupying David Ignatius’s Washington Post article titled “How will spy games work when there is no place to hide”. In the opening ceremony, he shared a warning from the CIA case officials in 2018, who said confidently: “Computer algorithms can quickly identify people not only through their faces, fingerprints or DNA, but also through the unique way they walk.”
Wild eye guess? Obviously not. In the May 7, 2025 Cornell Science Publication, researchers using a model called hyperopia were able to confirm 1,000 meters of human identity with 83% accuracy through gait assessment (among other measures). For spies who secretly operate at all costs to hide their movements and communications, there is now virtually “no place to hide”.
A moment of reflection is to appreciate the distance between spies cover and Tradecraft And our own daily privacy and confidentiality (including health-related information) is indeed narrow. Considering the words of former CIA Director General David H. Petraeus in 2012, “We must rethink the notion of our identity and confidentiality. … Each of the remaining bytes reveals information about location, habits and through extrapolation, intentions and possible behavior.”
Thirteen years later, Ignatius asked last week: “We're entering a new era where AI models are smarter than humans. Can they be better spies, too? That's the puzzle that creative AI companies are exploring.”
But no one knows better than the Nvidia president, that the bleeding of AI is approaching. Even before gait recognition, AI-powered FRT technology was common. They are everywhere – security, e-commerce, car licensing, banking, immigration, airport security, media, entertainment, entertainment cameras – now with healthcare with diagnostic, therapeutic and logistics applications.
Machine learning and AI enable FRT to replace speech recognition, iris scanning and fingerprinting. Now, in theory, “gait recognition” (plus data tracking) could reveal its identity as a masked facial hockey agent during a raid at one of the children’s parks in Los Angeles.
Jansen Huang still believes that the revolution is both manageable and progressive. He said last week: “A lot of work will be automated (but) will create new jobs, new jobs…AI is the ‘excellent equalizer’…because we use AI for research…as a mentor…as a mentor…as a coach…I can get better in many different fields, otherwise I would give my own boosters better pressure on my boosters because everyone gets better…they get better because they get more beneficial. Just got better because they have AI to help them with the diagnosis.
Is there anything that makes him get up at night? What about the fact that 80% of Chinese college students continue to receive a master's degree? It is while we are handcuffed, recruiting the best overseas ideas through tariffs and visa wars and targeting attacks on our Prime Minister’s University.
Speaking at the Hill & Valley Forum in Washington, D.C. on May 1, 2025, Huang highlighted the importance of keeping innovative leaders in controlling the risk/benefit endpoints of this technological revolution.
What is his concern? 1) More than 50% of artificial intelligence researchers in the world are Chinese. 2) Their AI algorithms and code are open source, while our AI algorithms and code are non-transparent and escape regulatory public/private censorship. 3) Our politics seems to be lagging behind and out of sync with the technology of “going forward at full speed”.
Mike Magee, MD, is a medical historian and routine journalist at THCB. He is the author of Code Blue: The Inside Medical Industry Complex of America. (Grove/2020)
