I am more focused on personal healthcare than I can remember ever being. One obvious reason is watching my brother-in-law struggle with his various maladies and the healthcare system’s back-and-forth about how best to handle it. I’ve seen the importance or specialist expertise in immediately fixing problems. I’ve seen specialists contradicting one another as to the state of their patient, perhaps overly focused on their specialty without adequate consideration of the bigger patient issue. I’ve also seen and felt the absence of a generalist who can bring all of the specialist issues into a rational prioritization and eliminate conflicts between the specialist courses of action and medications. Is it true that this situation involved a broader and more pernicious array of maladies than normal, but it is also the case that very few serious illnesses are one-dimensional. It would be hard to say that any of these medical professionals weren’t well-intentioned and serious about helping, it’s just that the nature of healthcare makes that all very hard. The vast amount of knowledge that a physician needs to have at the tip of their fingers and the even more vast array of paths that nature can take with the multifaceted complex systems that comprise the human body, makes it seemingly impossible for any physician or team of physicians to have sufficient command of many situations. This does not breed lots of confidence in the medical profession for me. Lucky for me, I don’t need a lot medically right now. Unlucky for me, approaching age 72 means that my odds of that changing for me get higher and higher with each passing year.
The one thing that is moving much faster than the advent of medical reality is the forward rush of technology, specifically the AI revolution, which is extremely well suited to the big data nature of medicine and the complexity of human systems. We have all been pondering and prognosticating about where and how the impact of AI is likely to be felt the most and the fastest. I am not personally thinking about it for investment purposes, but plenty are. What I am doing is trying to figure out how AI is going to change our lives. I used to think that meant how it would change the lives of my grandchildren and children, thinking that at my age, my life would not be so very impacted. I have changed my perspective on that based on just how fast AI is moving. I am not one of those who think AI is getting overhyped. I think it will change our world in ways that we can only begin to imagine. Obviously, I am hoping that the changes will be mostly for the better and not worse, but that remains to be seen. AI has tickled the collective imagination for some time now, actually since long before it became “real”. In film, it began when I was in high school with 2001: A Space Odyssey in the form of HAL 9000. The Terminator and Matrix series were sort of the scary side of that future. Jude Law and Steven Spielberg gave us A.I. Artificial Intelligence about childhood love. And starting ten years ago we started to see more realistic AI movies like Her (Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with his AI bot), Ex-Machina (aggressive female humanoid consciousness), Chappie (police robots), and, last and most relevantly, Elysium, where Matt Damon brings the broader world of AI healthcare and an ultimate solution to the masses of humanity rather than the elite few.
Every day I am reading about the latest greatest application of AI in our daily lives. The current hit parade of impact areas cause me to agree and disagree with how effective AI will be in that impact:
Work & Productivity – Writing, coding, and knowledge work are being transformed rapidly. AI assistants are handling drafts, analyzing data, generating code, and automating routine tasks. Many white-collar jobs are shifting from doing tasks to reviewing and refining AI outputs…it will change everything…quickly.
Content Creation & Media – AI is generating images, videos, music, and written content. This affects entertainment, marketing, social media, and news. Deepfakes and synthetic media are becoming harder to distinguish from real content…which strikes me as a serious limiting factor…
Customer Service – Chatbots and virtual assistants are handling more customer interactions, from simple queries to complex problem-solving. The experience is getting sophisticated enough that you often can’t tell immediately if you’re talking to AI or a person. The hottest area in business right now is “Agentic AI” which is about moving AI from being a reactive tool to something more like a capable colleague that can handle entire projects with varying levels of supervision.
Shopping – AI drives what you see on streaming services, social media feeds, online shopping suggestions, and targeted advertising – essentially curating your digital experience. This doesn’t even feel so new any more.
Transportation – Self-driving features in cars started almost eight years ago in Teslas…I had a 2016 Tesla X. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. This is an AI phenomenon which may move forward, but not without lots of pushback.
Education – Adaptive learning platforms are changing how people study and learn. I think this is one of the most important areas for AI to enter since AI makes education all that much more critical for people to be able to do anything other than menial tasks that AI can’t be bothered to do.
Healthcare – AI is improving diagnostics – reading medical images, detecting patterns in patient data, and flagging potential health issues earlier. This should potentially free up more time for actual patient care, but that remains to be seen.
Between my recent hospital visits and my experience with my own healthcare journey I’ve concluded that the future of healthcare is probably now all in the hands of AI. I honestly think that the big data needs and bodily system complexities, not to mention the growing pharmaceutical and clinical advances in medication, have made it almost impossible for human physicians to keep pace with what AI can do, especially in terms of diagnostics and prescriptive solutions. My own recent situation with edema, weight loss and blood pressure control are a good case in point. To begin with, I have no idea if my primary care physician uses AI in her practice or not, but in all three issues, I used my Claude AI to do research to address my concerns. I had seen my doctor a month prior to deciding to address my edema by suggesting to the doctor a change in my diuretic and its dosage. She complied and it immediately solved my edema. I had already researched the potential need to address electrolyte issues attached thereto and told her I might need supplemental potassium. She had me get a blood test and decided it was at low normal, but she prescribed a supplement anyway. Then I told her I wanted to go on Zepbound and she said…after about 10 minutes to contemplate…that I should go on Zepbound. When she screwed up the prescription with LilyDirect, I spoke to them and texted her telling her how to properly put in a revised prescription, which she did. Over the past six years she has been playing with my BP meds and had me on Ramapril, Clonidine, Hydralazine and Carvidilol with varying doses. When the new diuretic caused me to lose 20+ pounds I noticed improvement in my BP readings so I suggested reducing Carvidilol and Clonidine. She agreed with both and after my recent office visit, agreed I should eliminate Carvidilol entirely. This week my BP has shown further improvement dropping to 106/60, so I suggested reducing the Hydralazine. She said to drop the Carvidilol, having forgotten that we had already eliminated it. When I reminded her, she agreed that I should reduce the Hydralazine, but just to look on top of things, wants me to get another blood test to check Potassium. I told her I added daily Magnesium and she said that was probably a good idea for the electrolytes.
My point is simple. I pay attention and I have been able to use AI to get ahead of whatever recommendations my doctor has made. The healthcare system doesn’t seem to be able to do that…at least not for the three conditions I have addressed myself this year. I will admit that these are minor conditions compared to what my brother-in-law faced. But this is me using AI for research. Imagine when Agentic AI takes over medical diagnosis and prescribing. I’m sure it will still require an MD (or DO…or maybe a NP at least) to say its all OK, but I’m betting we will have far better healthcare service soon. And now I see people are saying that the Chatbots doing the diagnoses and prescriptions are far nicer and empathetic to patients than many of the healthcare professionals. So, the direction of all this seems pretty inevitable to me…the bedside manner of AI seems to be the winner here.