Access, affordability and effectiveness no longer need to be competing priorities. The challenges faced by current and future healthcare systems are no secret. Healthcare costs increase faster than GDP grows, and healthcare is the most labor-intensive industry of our times. It faces a globally growing, aging, population increasingly suffering multiple chronic conditions and consuming excessive amounts of resources. Three of healthcare systems' top priorities--access, affordability and effectiveness--have traditionally formed an "iron triangle" of dependence, unable to be improved simultaneously.

According to Gartner, 2020 will be a pivotal year in AI-related employment dynamics as artificial intelligence (AI) will become a positive job motivator. AI will create 2.3 million jobs in 2020, while eliminating 1.8 million. The number of jobs affected by AI will vary by industry: through 2019, healthcare, the public sector and education will see continuously growing job demand while manufacturing will be hit the hardest. Starting in 2020, AI-related job creation will cross into positive territory, reaching two million net-new jobs in 2025. "Many significant innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and AI will likely follow this route," said Svetlana Sicular, research vice president at Gartner.

In the sci-fi film Ex Machina, reclusive inventor Nathan Bateman foresees a bleak future, telling the movie's protagonist Caleb that, "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa." When we don't understand something, we tend to fear it; which is one reason popular movies like Ex Machina and HBO's nail-biting new series Westworld like to imagine futures in which artificial intelligence plots to destroy humanity. Fortunately, AI is far more likely to recommend those titles to your Netflix queue than to result in a dystopian society out of a George Orwell novel. While technologies including Amazon's Alexa have been busy making people's lives outside of the workplace easier, bots were the big office story in 2016, helping companies handle routine tasks such as managing support tickets and streamlining workflows. In the coming years, machine learning will take on more of the non-routine work as well, ushering in the new era of artificial intelligence--one that looks to be far brighter than the future Hollywood typically envisions.