A Conspiracy of Data: Fail Safe, Not Safe
USA Weekly Post welcomes Dr. Lonky, a physician, researcher, writer, and author whose career has spanned pulmonary and critical care medicine, toxicology, scientific writing, theater, and fiction. His debut novel, A Conspiracy of Data: Fail Safe, Not Safe, explores the rapidly changing relationship between medicine, artificial intelligence, data, and human judgment.
With decades of experience in medicine and a lifelong passion for storytelling, Dr. Lonky brings a unique perspective to the medical thriller genre. In this interview, he discusses the inspiration behind the novel, the evolution of medicine, the human side of patient care, his protagonist Dr. Alexander Gorman, and the questions surrounding AI-driven healthcare.
USA Weekly Post: To begin, could you tell our readers a little about yourself and your journey as a physician and writer?
Dr. Lonky: I’m a physician who started my career in academics. I trained in New York, St. Louis, and then San Diego. I was in San Diego as a National Institutes of Health fellow in biochemistry and lung injury.
I conducted my research and completed my pulmonary or lung medicine fellowship at the University of California, San Diego. I joined the faculty there for about seven years and then went into private practice in Los Angeles.
Since my area of research was lung injury from various environmental factors at a biochemical level, it was natural for people to seek me out regarding toxicologic work.
Throughout my career, starting in college, medical school, and then as a faculty member, I also acted. I did radio and television in college and was actually a sportscaster for college hockey.
I continued my acting career and developed a love for theater, fiction, and storytelling. I began writing pretty early and continued writing in my spare time, which wasn’t very much, because I went into pulmonary and critical care medicine in Los Angeles. I was very busy in intensive care units taking care of very sick people.
My day was full, so I stole an hour out of every day, pretty much, to do some writing.
My writing career continued in both scientific writing and fiction. Today, I am retired from the university and from actively treating patients in the hospital. I still do consultative work in complex cases involving environmental exposure and toxicology.
I write fiction in the form of plays and novels, and I also write nonfiction, particularly prescriptive nonfiction. Chronic illness and the epigenetic basis of illness are among my areas of nonfiction writing.
So, I’m as busy today as I was when I was seeing patients in intensive care units. What I do to keep busy has simply changed.
USA Weekly Post: A Conspiracy of Data: Fail Safe, Not Safe is your first novel. Have you written other books before this one?
Dr. Lonky: It’s my first novel and my debut work of fiction to be published.
I had a nonfiction book published called Outsmarting Obesity, which was published in 2024. I also have another book called Outsmarting Our Toxic Environment, which is finished and looking for a home with a publisher. My agent is searching for that home.
I’m very active in writing. Fail Safe, Not Safe is also part one, book one, of The Conspiracy of Data trilogy. I always envisioned it as three books.
USA Weekly Post: Do you have a website where readers can learn more about your work?
Dr. Lonky: I do. I have two websites. My fiction website is salonkyauthor.com, and my other website is DrLonky.com.
USA Weekly Post: What inspired you to transform your experience in medicine into a medical conspiracy thriller?
Dr. Lonky: I’ve been writing for a long time. I started out writing plays. My interest is in the fact that medicine is changing. That is the thrust of most of my fictional work and some of my nonfiction work.
What inspired me was watching medicine go from what we used to call the art of medicine—being able to examine someone, take a meaningful history from a patient, and be a detective.
We didn’t have CAT scans or MRIs when I started. We didn’t have half of the tests that we have today. That was in the 1970s.
I watched medicine go from that to what I see as a computer exercise today.
I’ve seen doctors walk into an intensive care unit and not even put a stethoscope or a hand on a patient. They don’t go to the bedside. They go to the computer. They look at the data. That’s all that matters.
As I watched this change happening, particularly over the last 30 years, I thought we were going to lose something.
We’re going to lose the ability of doctors in the future to even know how to take care of patients because they’re giving it over to machines and computers.
Because I love reading, especially thrillers and historical fiction, the idea came to me as the story of one doctor who is watching this transition and who has lived through parts of it.
That’s what inspired me.
USA Weekly Post: At the heart of your novel is a conflict between clinical intuition and AI-driven medicine. Why was that tension important for you to explore?
Dr. Lonky: Because there really is that conflict.
Clinical intuition doesn’t get much weight today. Clinical intuition is based on what you see in a patient, what you hear from a patient, what you feel with your hands, what you hear with your stethoscope, what you see on an X-ray, your clinical experience, and your reading of the literature.
AI-driven medicine is going to be based on facts.
There’s an old television show here in the United States called Dragnet. The detective, Joe Friday, used to say, “Just the facts.”
AI-driven medicine is very good at facts. It’s better than me.
And that conflict is a real conflict.
Do I think artificial-intelligence-driven medicine is going to be better medicine? Yes. It is. There is no question.
It will not overlook anything. I make that point in my book, Fail Safe, Not Safe, very early on. My protagonist, Alex, is caught in a situation that he would never have been caught in if AI-driven medicine had been in charge.
It never would have happened. I want to make that point very clear: AI-driven medicine will be more accurate and more complete.
But you know what’s missing?
The doctor sitting in an exam room telling you a joke and making you laugh.
The doctor putting a hand on you, listening to you, and being there for you to talk to.
That’s what’s missing.
Which is more important? It depends.
You certainly want your child, if you bring your child to the doctor, to get the right diagnosis. You don’t necessarily need them to laugh or get a lollipop.
That is the conflict, and that’s because it really is real.
USA Weekly Post: Your main protagonist, Dr. Alexander Korman, is a critical care physician rather than a professional detective. Why did you want an ordinary doctor to be pushed into the role of an investigator?
Dr. Lonky: Because it displays love.
Alex, even though he was estranged and separated from his former mentor, loved him. He says that right away in the first chapter.
Everybody loved Max because Max was a real legend, and Alex had a very close relationship with him.
You can’t watch your mentor get run down by a van, have the detectives tell you it was probably purposeful, and simply ignore it and go on with your life.
You can’t.
That’s the humanness of Alex Korman. It has to show that he has humanity.
Yes, AI is here. Computers and data are important. But love for your mentor, caring for a person, and getting the full answer are more important.
That’s what pushes him.
USA Weekly Post: How much of Alex’s worldview was shaped by your own decades of experience in critical care medicine?
Dr. Lonky: Very much by my own experience.
Taking care of critically ill patients is like taking care of their families because that’s what you wind up doing. It’s not just the patient.
It’s the wives, mothers, fathers, kids, uncles, and aunts who come to the intensive care unit and the hospital when they’re recovering.
Without that human connection, so much is lost. And I felt it. I was feeling it all the time.
My own worldview is that humanity is extremely important in medical care.
I can only tell you this: I have a lot of patients who come to see me in the office when there is nothing I can do for them. I can’t really change the course of their disease. I know that.
They’re there because they want to feel better.
They want someone to say, “I understand.” They want someone to make them laugh. Laughter is the best medicine.
I have patients who have survived so long that I never thought they would survive. I have patients in their hundreds. I can’t imagine it.
They come to every visit, and they get dressed up because it’s an event.
I treat them like it’s an event. That’s my worldview. Patients deserve that.
They don’t deserve just the right diagnosis and the right treatment.
There are people who would disagree and say, “That’s fine. You want the right diagnosis and you want the right treatment.”
I would want that for my kids and grandkids. Absolutely.
But there is a part of me that says what I liked most about being in practice was the people. That’s what I liked.
At the beginning, I liked making the right diagnosis, getting people through a critical-care period, and getting them to survive. That was most important to me, and it is still important to me.
But it became more than that.
The more you practice, the more you realize that most patients in that situation aren’t going to do too well. That’s why they’re in critical care to begin with.
You fight for them. But after a while, you begin to realize what was really important was that you were there for them.
You were there for their family.
That’s my worldview, and that’s Alex Korman’s worldview.
Of course, he gets caught up in something he had no intention of getting caught up in.
Now, how is he going to respond to that?
USA Weekly Post: The story begins when Alex’s mentor, Dr. Max, is killed. Why did the mentor-student relationship provide the right emotional foundation for your story?
Dr. Lonky: The trigger for the story is obviously the love that Alex had for Max.
Max was like a father figure to him.
You don’t know much about Alex’s background except that he had an ex-wife. You don’t know too much about his upbringing.
As the story goes along, you get snippets of it. You’ll get more of it in book two.
But the mentor-student relationship, particularly special mentor-student relationships, has great meaning.
I still remember my mentors—the ones who made an impact on my life.
To be frank with you, Max Fisher is the embodiment of the man who was my boss at UC San Diego, Dr. Ken Moser.
Ken Moser was just a prince of a man, and I loved him dearly.
So it was very personal to me too.
It made the most sense to have Max Fisher and Alex have a mentor-student relationship because I think it triggers most people into understanding why Alex would want to know the answer.
USA Weekly Post: Max leaves behind a coded warning suggesting that the AI system, which is supposed to be failsafe, may have been compromised. What fascinated you about turning a safety mechanism into a source of danger?
Dr. Lonky: My older brother, who has since passed away, was a physicist and was very interested in artificial intelligence, memory, and related subjects. He always got me thinking about those kinds of things.
The coded warning fascinated me because my understanding—and I think the understanding of people who are deeply involved in artificial intelligence and computerized medicine—is captured by the old saying, “garbage in, garbage out.”
AI has no goal. Do you know that?
Artificial intelligence has no goal. That’s the difference between AI and you and me.
It doesn’t want to be a doctor. It didn’t wake up this morning saying, “I want to have breakfast.”
It only does what it’s programmed to do.
So who does the programming?
People.
Are people biased? Of course they are. Am I biased? Yes. Is everybody biased? Yes.
So, if you have a system that you’re going to put in place and you promise everybody it’s going to be failsafe—”Nothing can happen here. Don’t worry”—then you have to ask what is happening behind the curtain.
It’s like The Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
We’ve got technology experts who say, “I’m in charge. I’ve got it all figured out.”
The world is full of people like that. People copy from each other. People have their own interests.
So we’re going to trust them?
And then we’re going to trust the government?
These are the questions that interested me.
I’ll tell you something as an aside. I started working on this book in 2016, and I had a pandemic in it.
I thought, “Nobody’s going to believe a pandemic.”
Then what happened in 2020?
COVID happened.
I had to change my book. I had to put COVID into it because now everybody could relate to the idea of a pandemic.
Instead of talking about a pandemic in 2016, when nobody was thinking about it, it became part of the world we were living in.
Then I had the whole conspiracy. I had a reason why somebody might create a virus that could be used as a weapon or to test certain hypotheses.
If I could devise a treatment program that took care of everything and everybody involved, I could set up the AI—quote, “failsafe”—to be manipulated.
I could manipulate it.
I could make it give the wrong diagnosis and the wrong course of action.
That was one of the reasons the coded warning was given: the safety mechanism could actually become a source of danger.
USA Weekly Post: The title, Fail Safe, Not Safe, immediately raises questions about trust. What does the title mean beyond the technology itself?
Dr. Lonky: People.
Do you trust people?
I trust a machine more than I trust people. I trust my dog more than I trust anybody else.
My dog only wants to eat, be taken for a walk, and be played with once in a while.
I don’t trust people. People have an agenda.
USA Weekly Post: How did you balance genuine medical science with the fictional and suspenseful elements of the novel?
Dr. Lonky: The balance with medical science is very simple because that’s the life I live.
The fictional and suspenseful elements came from my imagination.
I had a pandemic. I had a virus that was created. I had the question of too many people in the world.
That was another thing that gave me the impetus for why someone would pervert the technology.
There are large organizations in the world that believe there are too many people and that we consume natural resources too quickly.
There are arguments about population, carbon dioxide, the future of the planet, global warming, and now artificial intelligence.
Whatever the concern may be, the idea of population control becomes part of the fictional world I created.
What better way than an old-fashioned plague?
How would you do that?
If you have a single-payer system, a single database, and you’re matching that with AI, AI is going to give the right thing and save everybody.
But if you try to create a pandemic…
USA Weekly Post: Your novel brings together medicine, technology, conspiracy, and human relationships. What do you ultimately hope readers take away from the story?
Dr. Lonky: The central issue for me is that medicine is changing, and artificial intelligence will change it even more.
AI can provide tremendous accuracy and completeness. But medicine is not only about data.
There is also the human being sitting across from you.
There is the patient, the family, the relationship, the trust, and the responsibility that comes with caring for another person.
That human connection is something I don’t want us to lose.
And that’s part of what Alex Korman is fighting for.
Closing
USA Weekly Post: Thank you, Dr. Lonky, for sharing the story behind A Conspiracy of Data: Fail Safe, Not Safe and giving our readers a deeper look into the ideas, experiences, and questions that shaped the novel.
For readers fascinated by medical thrillers, artificial intelligence, suspense, and the future of healthcare, A Conspiracy of Data: Fail Safe, Not Safe offers a story that brings together science, mystery, technology, and the enduring importance of human connection.
Discover A Conspiracy of Data: Fail Safe, Not Safe and follow Dr. Lonky’s journey into the world where medicine, data, and artificial intelligence collide.
Visit the author’s website to learn more about the book and his work:
This interview has been edited for clarity and readability while preserving the author’s original responses and perspective.
