AI and Healthcare

Earlier this year I was fortunate to once again participate in one of Arc Fusion's Jeffersonian-style dinner talks, this time with a constellation of tech and design luminaries, such as Ray Kurzweil (Google), Lorie Fiber (IBM Watson), Paul Saffo (Stanford), and Bruce MacGregor (IDEO). Arc Fusion's mission is to convene top scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, artists, and doers to explore the frontiers of health, IT, and biomedicine. This "recipe for dialogue" worked incredibly well, and the overall tone of conversation was very positive, focusing on the potential power and impact of exponential information technologies. Led by insights from Ray Kurzweil, who has exhaustively studied the growth curves of various digital technologies, we discussed how the next two or three "doublings" of computing power are about to unleash completely astonishing breakthroughs--including the possibility of extending the human lifespan indefinitely. Even before these coming leaps in computing power arrive, we're already seeing some of the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted healthcare, as cloud-based systems, such as IBM Watson, turn their vast computing power on fast-moving fields like oncology: It's clear that AI appears poised to increase patient safety, drive early prevention by predictive modeling, and, eventually, maybe even extend human lifespans to unimaginable lengths.