Former Time Magazine editor says AI’s real revolution isn’t in Silicon Valley, but in healthcare, education, and government

The most important advances in artificial intelligence aren’t emerging from Silicon Valley boardrooms or doomsday think tanks. They’re happening in hospital rooms, classrooms, and government offices, according to journalist Josh Tyrangiel.

Tyrangiel, the former deputy managing editor of Time magazine, argues in his new book, “AI for Good,” that the technology’s greatest potential lies in the hands of doctors, educators, and public servants — not the tech moguls who build it.

“I kept running into this very basic question, which is, hey, what’s this good for? Like, what’s actually going to happen that’s going to change people’s lives?” Tyrangiel told “Seattle’s Morning News.” “There are sort of two stock answers. One is it’s going to cure cancer, and then the other is it may rob humanity of all of its existence, and I sort of thought, no, I bet you there’s something in between.”

That middle ground led Tyrangiel to the Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s top healthcare systems, where administrators made what he calls a critical distinction early on: doctors, not technologists, would decide how AI is used.

One standout example involves sepsis, a deadly immune response to infection that kills roughly 350,000 Americans annually. Cleveland Clinic deployed AI-driven prediction software that monitors patient signals and alerts physicians when sepsis may be developing. Early detection allows treatment with simple antibiotics before the condition becomes life-threatening.

The results were striking. Over the course of a year, the hospital reduced sepsis mortality by 41%.

“AI is not perfect, but we saved 1,000 lives — that seems pretty good,” Tyrangiel said, paraphrasing the clinic’s CEO.

In education, Tyrangiel chronicled the partnership between Khan Academy, the well-known nonprofit, and OpenAI to develop an AI tutor called Khanmigo. The challenge proved far more complex than expected.

“You go to GPT for answers, right? It’s trained as an assistant, not a tutor,” he said. “It’s actually a lot harder than you think to make AI do something different than just be your assistant.”

What surprised observers most was who embraced it. Students were largely indifferent, treating it as just another application on their laptops. But veteran teachers, particularly those Tyrangiel observed in Indiana, found the tool transformative — turning decades-old lectures into interactive labs and using the bot to identify struggling students in real time.

“It was a really useful tool for teaching and grabbing engagement and making kids more social and changing learning,” he said.

Skepticism towards AI still ‘essential’

Still, Tyrangiel said healthy skepticism toward AI is not only understandable, but essential. He also said not all young people are embracing the technology.

“If you’ve been paying attention to the last 20 years, you’ve seen a lot of the companies that brought us social media over-promise what it’s going to do, take money, take attention, and not really care about society,” he said. “These kids are skeptical, and for very good reason.”

That skepticism, Tyrangiel argued, is precisely what will force companies to deliver AI tools that genuinely serve the public rather than simply maximize profit.

“The whole point of this book is that there are great uses, but we’re going to have to demand that the companies deliver these uses the way we want them,” he said. “If not, we’re just going to sit downstream of whatever they give us, whatever is most profitable, and we’re going to suffer for it.”

Looking ahead, Tyrangiel warned that the window for shaping AI’s trajectory is narrowing. Despite early predictions that the pace of improvement would plateau, the technology continues to accelerate.

“That means that we only have so much time in which we can mold it, and I think that’s why it’s really urgent to get involved and to use the tools,” he said. “This is going to take skepticism and involvement and real passion if we want it to work the way we want it to work.”

Manda Factor is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. Follow Manda on X and email her here. 

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