Tag: health

Health Takes Center Stage, Open Evidence Acquired (Predictions 2026, #5 and #4)

Yesterday The Information scooped my well laid plans for today’s health and AI-related predictions. If you’ve been following along this past week, you know I decided to write one prediction post a day for the first working week of the year. Today marks #5, which predicts that health will become a central player in society’s debate around AI, and #4, which predicts OpenEvidence will be acquired. I knew that OpenAI was working on health-related product offerings – the company said as much when it hired Fidji Simo from Instacart. But I didn’t know OpenAI would announce its health product so early in the year. Oh, and by the way, Google is expected to quickly do the same.

That said, I think there’s a lot more room to run in this story. OpenAI’s announcement is just the prelude. Health offers the perfect test case of just about every crucial limitation –  and every massive opportunity – that AI represents in society today.

Read More
Leave a comment on Health Takes Center Stage, Open Evidence Acquired (Predictions 2026, #5 and #4)

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

What I’ve Learned: On Health

The holidays bring us all a moment to reflect. If you’re like nearly everyone I’ve spoken to these past few weeks, 2025 offered a lot of grist for contemplation. I usually write my predictions for next year around this time, but today I’d rather think out loud about something a bit more personal.

2025 was the year I turned 60 years of age. I hesitated before writing that sentence, because … well, like everyone I know who’s made it this far, I’ve become obsessed with understanding what it means to face the inevitable social, physical, and emotional impact of “getting older.” It’s probably one of the driving reasons for investing a considerable portion of the past two years of my life into DOC, a new company focused on the science of longevity medicine.

Read More
2 Comments on What I’ve Learned: On Health

Will AI Replace Doctors?

DOC 2025 Debaters: Reid Hoffman, Eric Verdin, Anitha Kannan, and Mike Krieger

At the inaugural DOC gathering last year, famed Valley VC Vinod Khosla made a bold prediction: AI will soon make medical care “essential free,” while at the same time enabling human doctors to scale their knowledge and caregiving five to ten fold. Bill Gates has made similar claims – and gone even further, saying that AI will “replace many doctors” with 10 years.

As we all contemplate a future of “AI everywhere,” perhaps no question is more polarizing than this: Will AI make human work obsolete? And if so, what happens to all of us? It’s the defining question of Mustafa Suleyman’s 2023 book “The Coming Wave,” in which Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, argues that AI will have “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce. “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton strikes a darker tone, warning “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”

Read More
Leave a comment on Will AI Replace Doctors?

Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

 

Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information online. Both Crovitz and Brill have long and storied careers in “traditional” media – Brill started American Lawyer and CourtTV and authored countless pieces of long form reporting, and Crovitz was the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

NewsGuard launched as something of a bullshit detector during the ascendence of social media eight years ago. The company’s first product created “reliability ratings” of news and information-based websites. Not surprisingly, the company immediately became a target of the far right media ecosystem, and remains one today.

Read More
Leave a comment on Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

Wait, What’s This DOC Thing You’re Doing?!

An old friend asked me what I was up to the other day, and despite two years having passed since I started getting that question (here’s my first post on the subject), I realized I’ve not made much progress on a concise answer. Usually I’ll list the various projects that currently fill my day – working on the P&G Signal conference, trying my best to be a good board member at a number of media, tech, and data companies, managing various investments, and running a new health event I co-founded last year called DOC. 

“Wait,” my friends invariably ask. “Why are you involved in a health project?!”

Read More
1 Comment on Wait, What’s This DOC Thing You’re Doing?!

Introducing DOC

Late last year I wrote about my transition from being work-driven to being life-driven. It hit a chord – many of you are on similar journeys, particularly those of us who are looking toward, and past, middle age. Buried a couple of thousand words into that post, in the section about what I was up to after selling The Recount, was this line: “I’m helping to stand up a new kind of gathering at the intersection of science, medicine, and longevity.” My partners and I have spent the past six months developing that gathering, and I’m very proud to announce it’s got a name, a date, and most importantly, a program with a purpose.

My co-founders Dr. Jordan Shlain and Kevin Ryan and I have christened the community we’re forming DOC. Our inaugural gathering is October 24th – 26th at The Estate Yountville in Napa, California. DOC is invitation only and close to full, but if you’re interested in learning more, you can request an invite here.

Read More
2 Comments on Introducing DOC

The Tragedy of the Data Commons

Before, and after?

A theme of my writing over the past ten or so years has been the role of data in society. I tend to frame that role anthropologically: How have we adapted to this new element in our society? What tools and social structures have we created in response to its emergence as a currency in our world? How have power structures shifted as a result?

Read More
6 Comments on The Tragedy of the Data Commons

Bad Policy Makes Us Sick. Business Must Lead Us Back.

WALL-E-382

(Cross posted from NewCo Shift)

Walking around Disneyland with my daughter the other night, I found myself face to face with one of our country’s most intractable taboos.

(Disneyland is still awesome for me, as a kid from 1970s LA. Truly magical.)

If you’re an observer of crowds, one of the more prominent features of the Disneyland crowd is how generally overweight our country has become (I live in the Bay area, and readily admit my interaction with folks on most days is not representative of a broad cross section of our population). I’d estimate at least a third of the folks at Disney are seeing Mike and Molly-level images in the mirror — and about 2–3% or so have more weight than they can carry around, and have therefore graduated to “mobility scooters.”

Read More

Leave a comment on Bad Policy Makes Us Sick. Business Must Lead Us Back.