The World Health Organization’s chief scientist wants the global health body to better prepare for future scientific and technological developments instead of react to them. That’s the case with artificial intelligence, which Jeremy Farrar regrets the WHO didn’t focus on enough before the release of ChatGPT, the bot that can pass medical exams, sent the world into a tizzy. An infectious disease expert, Farrar led the U.K. health charity Wellcome for nearly two decades before taking over as the WHO’s chief scientist last year. He laid out his lessons learned in an interview with Carmen, which has been edited for length and clarity. How should the WHO handle technological change? Science to me is about looking to the future of what’s possible, and I think it’s also about anticipating what’s coming rather than reacting to it. We cannot predict the future, but we can frame what is coming. Although I hadn’t heard of ChatGPT two years ago, people had it on their agenda. And I think that WHO and other technical agencies of the U.N. need to be forward-thinking in terms of anticipating what technological and scientific changes, in whichever discipline or science, are coming. We need to anticipate them so that we can facilitate rather than react. What do you mean by facilitate? With AI at the moment — in which I’m not an expert — we’re sort of reacting now, thinking about what regulation we need to put around it, how we can make sure it's safe. Maybe we should have had those discussions five years ago so we could have gotten ahead of other questions: How do we maximize its benefit? How do we maximize the equity that’s in it and not increase inequity? And how do we make sure we provide regulation that ensures safety and quality while allowing innovation to happen? Is it too late to do that? Every time we face a new technology, probably throughout history, from the printing press to genomics to AI, it’s always frightening and rightly so because it’s new, it’s different. But many of these technological and scientific advances — with some exceptions, of course — have proved to be incredibly positive. I think in today’s world, we can anticipate that better.
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