AI

As the Gary and Mary West Professor of Innovative Medicine and Founder/Director of the Scripps Translational Institute, Eric Topol is in the visionary business, trying to imagine what medicine will look like in the future. His current book, Deep Medicine, explores how artificial intelligence will affect all aspects of healthcare – from the obvious stuff (reading x-rays) to the not-so-obvious (creating digital twins for research studies). AI, Topol says, has the potential to improve the life of patients AND doctors, freeing the latter from their keyboards, giving them the gift of time, allowing them to connect with patients in a whole new way (wait, he wants doctors to be… genetic counselors?). Or it could reinforce the same commercial pressures and inequities that burden the field of medicine today.