A case for machine-generated empathy, musings on homeschooling and why it's important to first figure out what doctors are meant to do
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-5-ken-liu-the-humanistic
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https://puneetseth.substack.com/
This week’s guest is Ken Liu. Ken is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also penned the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker.
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.
I was first introduced to Ken’s writing through a short story he wrote called “Good Stories”, which explores creativity in a world where AI generates most of the content, and the highlights the struggle of an author who feels that humans crave human-generated art and writing. This piece made me think about how we might feel in the future about empathy coming from AI and machines vs. human clinicians, and I explored this in another .
