32. It's 2027 & you're In full control

Hi friends,

Welcome to the thirty-second dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

This month, we’re reading The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI by futurist and technologist Ray Kurzwell.

The best overview I’ve read of Ray’s healthcare predictions comes from Peter Diamandis, another prolific technologist and entrepreneur. 

Peter writes, “Scenario 1: It’s January 2027. You wake up. Your digital health assistant takes 30 seconds to run a full diagnostic of your body, downloading dozens of sensors capturing gigabytes of data. It tells you that based on the last 48 hours you might be coming down with the flu.

Scenario 2: You need a surgery, and rather than interviewing human doctors, you opt for an autonomous robotic surgeon that’s done your particular surgery over 10,000 times.

Scenario 3: Recently, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 3 completed a detailed AI model of your specific biology (your cells, tissues, and organs). Now every medicine you take is tailored 100% for your exact genomics and lifestyle. No guessing, no side effects.”

One of the most powerful attributes of AI is its capacity for the exponential—to scale research, drug therapy, and patient facing personalization beyond our current imagination.  

Ray writes, “Despite all the marvelous advances of scientific medicine over the past two hundred years… much of medicine is built on messy approximations that are usually mostly right for most patients but probably aren’t totally right for you… When medicine relied solely on painstaking laboratory experimentation and human doctors passing their expertise down to the next generation, innovation made plodding, linear progress. But, AI can learn from more data than a human doctor ever could and can amass experience from billions of procedures instead of the thousands a human doctor can perform in a career.” (Kurzwell, pg 235 - Kindle) 

He provides a number of examples, but one that clearly demonstrates the point is: 

“A human researcher using her own knowledge and cognitive skills might be able to identify a few dozen molecules with potential to treat a disease, but the actual number of possibly relevant molecules is generally in the trillions… In 2020 a team at MIT used AI to develop a powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in existence. Rather than evaluate just a few types of antibiotics, it analyzed 107 million of them in a matter of hours and returned twenty-three potential candidates, highlighting two that appear to be the most effective.” (Kurzwell, pg 236-237 - Kindle) 

Peter shares four fundamental attributes of AI that will change how all of us experience access to healthcare:

1. Empathy: While many of us worry that AI removes the “human touch,” published data consistently shows that AI is considered much more empathetic than physicians when speaking with patients. AI does not get frustrated if a patient has a number of questions, it can stay on the phone with a patient for as long as needed, and it has so many data points there is no socioeconomic background that it cannot understand or engage with. 

2. Analytics: Today’s language learning models can take in gigabits of health data, analyze them all in the context of you, and generate diagnoses.

3. 24/7 Access: Patient facing AI applications are available 24/7, anytime, anywhere. They can passively gather data from the sound of your cough, your heart rate, or the pallor of your skin, while integrating all of the information from your wearables and digital health applications.

4. Personalized: Your AI assistant will learn your preferences, anticipate your needs and behaviors, monitor your health, and be your personalized problem solver supporting your overall holistic health. 

How do these scenarios make you feel? Do any scare you? Do they excite you? Do you feel yourself floating within what I like to call delicious ambiguity?

Until next week, friends.

With gratitude,