The promise of blockchain technology couldn't be greater than in the healthcare sector. A prime example is the groundbreaking deployment of blockchain technology by Intermountain Healthcare, a Utah-based, not-for-profit system of 22 hospitals. This medical group has more than 1,600 physicians and advanced practice clinicians at 180 clinics. Intermountain is using blockchain-based technology coupled with artificial intelligence to identify waste in its massive healthcare system, creating better outcomes for patients, and significant savings all around. According to Frank Ricotta, CEO of BurstIQ, the future of healthcare will be driven by data, and blockchain technology is the enabling foundational technology. He explains, "Blockchain is a trust overlay over the Internet that allows parties to transfer representations of value, like health data, safely and securely."

The ethical issues swirling around artificial intelligence (AI) are under-researched, with surprisingly little serious academic investigation into AI ethics, despite the huge amount of money pouring into the field and the rampant pace at which the technology is advancing. "I had hoped to be here today and tell you about the wealth of scientific research that's being done on ethics and AI. Because we found very little," Maria de Kleijn-Lloyd, Elsevier's senior vice president of analytical services told a Science Business conference earlier this month. "There is a lot of discourse on ethics in AI," said de Kleijn-Lloyd. But in terms of academia's two-thousand year tradition of rigorous ethical inquiry, when it comes to AI, "we haven't really joined the two up," she said.