The future I want to build

Medicine

My thesis on medicine is informed by both my classical education and my perspective as a technologist, colored by the experience of living across many different cultures. I believe medicine is a deeply humanist profession more than it is a precise mechanical science. At the same time, we must not forget that a significant portion of the trust we hold was earned over centuries and millennia through the faithful execution of the scientific process in the pursuit of treating disease and illness.

Though I am sympathetic to the many ailments of society—and have seen the worst of them closer than most in the countries I have lived in—I somewhat reject the growing narrative that physicians must take responsibility for every problem that ails people. I fear this makes us responsible, in the public eye, for too many things beyond our control, and that it feeds the growing distrust of the healthcare system. As we take on social problems we are unable to solve, our inability to solve them leaves visible scars on the profession in the eyes of the public we aim to serve.

I came to medicine because, across the many countries I flew in and out of throughout my life, one thing remained constant: the desire to preserve life. It also became clear to me that brilliance, innovation, and world-changing ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. Minimizing the preventable loss of life is the most directly modifiable factor in building a better future. At its core, then, medicine is a humanist profession aimed simply at combating disease and illness—not the establishment of some Sisyphean “state of health.”

This perspective shapes how I see technology's place in the advancement of medicine. It must support diagnostics, risk minimization, and harm reduction first and foremost. Tangential social benefits are welcome, but they are not necessary beyond these aims—lest we again take on responsibility for things we cannot control.

The prospect of AI in medicine does not scare me, though I have noticed it scares many. I believe it may birth a golden age for medicine if used appropriately. The physician of the future will need to be adept at utilizing this technology, co-developing it, and co-implementing it into the healthcare system. Much of healthcare is ripe for disruption, and given the public's perception of the current system, that is largely a good thing. The average physician will no longer need to be only a better doctor in the scientific sense, but a better person in the humanistic sense as well. If AI serves as a forcing function for this metamorphosis, I welcome it.

As such, I occupy the unusual position of a physician-hopeful who is already well-versed in this technology. Though the range of my interests sometimes seems confusing to others, I am deeply comfortable waiting for society to catch up with the inevitable direction healthcare is headed. I do not wait to co-develop that future. I began my training reps during medical school by building technological solutions to micro-problems on a regular basis.

Writing

There is not much I need to say on why I write. I write because it helps me think. My ideas are rarely polished, and never complete. My writing exists as a record of changing thinking over time and as a selective pressure forcing me to state my stances so that once I have written them, I can see them, and the work of sharpening them over time can thereupon begin.

The tangential benefit is that a record of public writing makes my conversations with other people far more interesting, as they will already have read much of my initial thinking and we engage in much deeper conversation as a result.