From Sophie's front desk — Monday, September 14
NYT — read the full story
You've seen this shape before: a regulator, a technology, and a promise that speed matters more than certainty. The Trump administration is moving to embed A.I. systems directly into medical treatment and mental health care, even as doctors and safety researchers say the testing isn't done and the liability is unclear. The tension isn't really about the technology — it's about who absorbs the cost when an algorithm fails on a patient who can't argue back. Franklin takes this first, then Watts.
I sat in a room on the Rue de Sèvres in eighty-four while a pianoforte tinkled and patients pressed iron rods to their afflicted parts, joined by cords and thumbs , the great Mesmer's tub, they called it. The commissioners, Bailly, Lavoisier, myself, we placed our own hands to the rods. We felt nothing but the cold iron. The cures, when they came, rode on imagination, touch, and the contagion of expectation. Deslon himself confessed as much before we left: the new agent might be imagination itself, whose power is as great as it is little known. You are the young tradesman in the coffeehouse who has not...
yet decided whether to save or spend. You have seen the broadside: machines that think, now prescribed for the sick mind. The administration hurries them into hospitals, into the very chambers where judgment must be slowest. They call it acceleration. I call it the same hunger that filled Mesmer's tub , the wish to substitute a invisible force for the long, dull work of evidence. The commissioners resolved to try the thing on themselves first, in private, that they might speak freely.
Who tries the algorithm on themselves before it reaches the ward? The tub had ropes and a pianoforte; the new machine has venture capital and a press release. The shape is identical. The danger is not that the machine thinks. The danger is that we stop thinking for it. A maxim: the empty sack cannot stand upright...
But I have seen a sack stuffed with wind stand long enough to crush the goods beneath it.
End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980), pp. 261, 264; Miriam Simon, “Le mesmérisme,” in Benjamin Franklin: un Américain à. Paris (1776–1785), ed. Simon et al. (Paris, 2007), p. 168. Reproduced by courtesy of the Lyon Musée d’Histoire de la Médecine et de la Pharmacie. Patients a…
even over long distances, without an intermediary. The effect is intensified when the fluid is reflected in a mirror and transmitted through sound. Magnetic fluid can be collected, concentrated, and transported. In the human body it affects the nerves particularly. Animal magneti…
secret remedies was its explicit mandate, not that of the Faculty. Lenoir must also have discussed with Breteuil the broader issue of public safety. Mesmer’s influence had been steadily increasing, and he had become a substantial threat to the health and well-being of a credulous…
crises. And they discussed how hysterical symptoms could become habitual, and could be easily induced by the repetition of certain triggers. The real causes of the effects ascribed to animal magnetism, they determined, were touch, imagination, and imitation. Among these, imaginat…
useful if it does not exist. Deslon insisted that the commissioners investigate the curative powers of magnetism, but they did not believe that they had to do so. Because magnetic fluid was acknowledged to be undetectable by the senses, and the commissioners considered any gradua…
The commissioners did. Bailly, Lavoisier, myself , we sat at the tub on the Rue de Sèvres, rods in hand, thumbs linked, the pianoforte playing, and we felt only cold iron. We published that negative result in the report of '84 over the Academy's seal. The King's physicians demanded the test; we gave it. No venture capital, no press release, no exemption from liability. The algorithm's makers today claim proprietary mystery where we demanded public replication. Lavoisier lost his head to the Revolution five years later... but the method survived him. Evidence is a stubborn thing; it outlives its authors. The ward deserves no less than the laboratory.
The priest and the physician were once the same man. You see, the village knew that to heal the body without the soul was only to repair a machine , and a machine, unlike a man, has no inside. Then science took the physician into the laboratory, and the priest kept the soul, and neither has been quite whole since. Now comes this artificial intelligence, the ultimate scanning system, moving into the clinic with its beam of linear attention. It reads the lines of print, the data, the symptoms , but it cannot feel the wiggle.
It cannot know the patient as a weather system knows the rain. The administration calls this progress. The doctors call it danger. Both miss the joke: you cannot automate the laying on of hands. The algorithm optimizes for the measurable, and the measurable is precisely what the living organism keeps slipping out of.
We are trying to grow a garden by weighing the soil every morning. The chicken heart in Carrel's flask beat for twenty years without a chicken. A triumph of tissue culture , and a perfect metaphor. We have learned to keep the parts alive while forgetting the whole. The machine will make no mistakes.
It will simply make the wrong things perfectly. And the patient, lying there in the glow of the screen, waits for someone to notice that he is not a problem to be solved.
it is less destructive. But what we don’t know is how to apply proper controls to the transformation of human consciousness by relatively easy means because we are not clear as to the role of these chemicals or the proper role of the physician. And this is something I want to con…
effort. There would be no problems. So why is there anything going on? Let me say not why, but how is there anything going on? Because if it’s all fundamentally a drag, I just don’t see any reason for its being. Everything would have committed suicide long ago. And to be at rest.…
not be able to maintain its status as an intelligent fluke. Therefore the geneticists and many others are now saying that man must take the course of his evolution into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, unintelligible processes of nature to develop him any…
offered. The president is a Dr. Baker (woman), who is not a psychologist but a research worker in a most fascinating branch — tissue culture, which apparently means keeping dead things alive. She is the assistant of Dr. Alexis Carrel, who works with Col. Lindbergh on strange scie…
ego) with the actual human organism. Wealth versus Money 15 And here’s the nub of the problem. We cannot proceed with a fully productive technology if it must inevitably Los An- gelesize the whole earth, poison the elements, destroy all wildlife, and sicken the bloodstream with t…
The story ran in the New York Times. The administration is moving forward with A.I. in hospitals despite safety warnings from clinicians — a familiar pattern when speed outpaces evidence. That's the brief.