“Everything the light touches is our kingdom.” This is not what President Trump said before signing the executive order to restrict states from passing laws that regulate AI. This is what Mufasa tells his soon-to-be-king son in The Lion King, one of Disney’s most popular films. It seemed like an appropriate movie for this week’s blog, given that Walt Disney just handed off The Lion King’s Mufasa and Simba to OpenAI. According to their 3-year deal, Sora (ChatGPT’s sister tool that allows people to create AI-generated videos) will allow regular people to create short-form videos using Disney characters just by texting a few prompts. While we have not figured out how to make these videos happen yet, we do have more on the new executive order below in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
Today’s news is also not in short-video form, but hopefully your attention spans will last for these three important highlights from this week:
- Medicare beneficiaries and providers will be able to use CLEAR‘s modernized, secure identity verification platform when accessing accounts through Medicare.gov through a new contract that is part of CMS’s Health Tech Ecosystem “Kill the Clipboard” initiative.
- The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) published a commentary piece by two patient advocates that identified “critical health AI literacy” — the ability to evaluate AI outputs for bias, accuracy, institutional alignment and advocate effectively – as a necessary tool for patient empowerment.
- Momentum introduced Open Wearables, an open-source platform that unifies data from over 200 wearable devices into a single application programming interface (API). The goal is to standardize access to wearable data and streamline the creation of personal health apps.
“As king, you need to respect all the creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.” “But, Dad, don’t we eat the antelope?” Again, this is dialogue from the movie The Lion King, not witty banter between AI Czar David Sacks and President Trump as they decided that state legislatures should not stand in the way of artificial intelligence innovation. Indeed, at the Oval Office signing of the executive order that is designed to restrict states from passing or enforcing AI regulation, David Sacks said “…we’re going to push back on the most onerous examples of state regulations” right after President Trump said “We have to be unified…China is unified because they have one vote, that’s President Xi. He says do it, and that’s the end of that.” And so, despite the fact that this executive order will likely be challenged in court, the White House is doing what Congress has not done to thwart a myriad of confusing and often conflicting state laws that regulate the development, deployment, and use of artificial intelligence. President Trump has a point when he wrote: “You can’t expect a company to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something. THAT WILL NEVER WORK!” It is pretty interesting that the United States — just because we have states — is so much slower than other nations to create a uniform set of rules for new technologies like artificial intelligence. But this executive order reminds me of what the little lion cub Simba said in the movie The Lion King: “My dad just showed me the whole kingdom, and I’m gonna rule it all!”
