I am sorry to disappoint those of you who read the title of this post and are now eagerly anticipating a thorough analysis of the 2001 Philadelphia 76ers attempt to win the NBA championship with a single transcendent superstar (Allen Iverson aka AI aka The Answer) and a roster full of mediocre role players (spoiler alert: they did not).

Instead, the focus of today’s post is to solicit the questions you have about utilizing artificial intelligence as you determine whether generative AI is the answer for your workplace needs. Whether it’s Maillardet’s Automaton writing poetry in multiple languages in the 19^th century, Johnny 5 quoting the Three Stooges in the 1980’s, or trained AI voice model’s impersonating Johnny Cash singing “Barbie Girl” in 2023, there are plenty of examples of the frivolous use of artificial intelligence. But unless your boss is a huge Frank Sinatra fan who has been dying to hear what it would sound like if Old Blue Eyes crooned Green Day’s “Basket Case,” not terribly useful at work.

Fortunately, our Do We Really Need Another Session About AI? session at CMEpalooza Fall (Wednesday, October 18 — mark it in your calendar now) is here to help you figure out how AI can make your work life a little bit easier. In order to streamline this session and focus the presentations on the needs and knowledge gaps of the audience, our panelists have put together a few questions that they would love to have as many of you as possible answer (note from Scott: The over/under on participation is the same as the jersey number that Derek’s precious AI wore back in the day).

You can answer one question or you can answer all four (or two, or three questions), but we’re hoping that you can take a moment now to at least share your thoughts. I’ll leave the survey open until September 1 in case you would like to take a few days to reflect and come back later to respond.

I am sure you have all been reading in the news over the course of the last year or so about the impact that inflation is having on society. Things are always going to cost more – that’s simply the way finances work – so no, I’m not so worried about that guy who keeps screaming, “I remember when I used to be able to get a slice of pizza for a quarter. Bring back Nixon!” But it is undeniable that this has been a belt-tightening time as costs for just about everything are rising more quickly than many would like.

And, well, at CMEpalooza, things are unfortunately no different.

That is why Derek and I had a very long talk last week about the impact of inflation and the cost of our biannual events. We went back and forth — many hours of mostly silence on the phone (“Are you still there?” “Yeah” “You?” “Yep”) — before deciding that the registration costs for CMEpalooza will, effective immediately, be increasing by 25%. It pains me even to write that, but it was simply unavoidable.

Now I know that some of you didn’t excel in math as students, so let me explain to you what that means in dollars and cents. The “old” cost of attending CMEpalooza was $0. Now multiply this by 25% (or 0.25) and you get the new cost of attending CMEpalooza. If you’ve done things correctly, you should find that this “new” cost of attending CMEpalooza is $0.

(Remember that anything multiplied by zero is zero. So I could have said, “We’re increasing the cost by 34150%” and the result wouldn’t have been any different.)

That’s right folks — CMEpalooza will continue, for now and forever, to be free for everyone.

Our panels for CMEpalooza Fall are furiously working on content for the best education that money can’t buy. So put away your wallets, mark down your calendars for Wednesday, October 18, and enjoy that $25 hamburger at the restaurant down the street guilt free.

As noted in last week’s post announcing the agenda for CMEpalooza Fall, I spent last week on vacation with my family. We were in and around Boston for the better part of 6 days. Boston would be one of my favorite cities in the United States were it not for their arrogant, haughty sports fans (“And over here we have one of our 452 championship trophies. Oh wait, I forgot, it’s 453. One of our teams won again last night.”).

But seriously, Boston is a great city – immensely walkable, appropriately historic, and quite clean (at least in and around downtown where we spent most of our time). I’ve been there many times over the years for personal and work purposes, but this was my first extended time as a tourist.

As I’ve written about in previous years, one of my favorite things to do when I am on vacation is to spend time in that city’s main public library branch (you don’t have to scream, “NERD!!” I get it). Like some of you, I grew up in an era where libraries meant one and only one thing – books. Maybe there were a few tables and chairs strewn about, but libraries of the 1980s generally weren’t considered places to linger around in comfort. It would probably take you 20 minutes to find the book you wanted after digging through the card catalog and book stacks (and don’t get me started if you needed to dig through microfiche for research purposes), but once you got your books, you would check them out and bring them home. Maybe there were one or two beanbag chairs, but that was about the extent of it.

And so frankly, it amazes me every time I visit a big city library to see how they have reimagined their spaces in recent decades. In Boston, I walked into the entrance and just about bumped into Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was being interviewed live in the NPR studio tucked into one of the corners of the library. Further on, there was a 6-piece band playing in the courtyard entertaining those who were eating lunch. Then there was the dainty restaurant that served a massive afternoon tea each day ($65 a person for lots of fancy finger foods, tea sandwiches, and the like – I didn’t partake). Upstairs was the “special collection” area where you could have actual librarians in white gloves (OK, they were cheap, latex blue gloves) very excitedly showing off the various documents they had curated for the month’s theme of “Magic in the Early 1900s.” My son quite enjoyed the “teen center” where they had video games galore you could play for as long as you wanted.

Now don’t get me wrong – I loved the boring old libraries as a kid too. Not all of us are as bourgeoisie as Derek and can afford to shell out $35 in a bookstore every time we want to read something new. The fact that I can simply walk into my library, grab any stack of books I want, and not even have to worry about overdue fines anymore still amazes me.

But to see how libraries have evolved into spaces that truly serve their community got me thinking — why aren’t we doing more of this in medical education? Why aren’t we reimagining how we use our educational spaces to better serve our audience of learners? While there is nothing wrong with the “tried and true” dais of speakers and slide decks, are there innovations we can all consistently build into the live education model to transform them into more efficient learning spaces? I’m not talking about throwing away the core tenets of what we do, but how do we build upon our past to create a more engaging future?

We talk about these sorts of things often during CMEpalooza, and we try to inject new ideas of our own into many of our sessions, but there are probably things we could do better as well. Creativity isn’t always easy when you’ve been doing something well for many years (and yes, I know we may also need to convince funders to, you know, put dollars behind some of our wackier ideas). But I figure that if something as staid as the public library can break from its traditional model, so can we.