Healthy Choices
“Healthy Choices” – A cartoon that illustrates why smarter tech doesn’t mean healthier lives.
Chronic diseases account for roughly 80% of healthcare spending in developed economies, yet most are preventable. Everyone understands the value of prevention, but few of us act on it consistently. Governments have tried to close the gap with smoking bans, sugar taxes and public health campaigns. Insurance companies push annual checkups. Behavioral economists have designed incentives to nudge better habits.
Now AI is starting at the interpretation layer. Perplexity Health allows users to combine wearable data, lab results and medical records into a single system, query it, and compare it against medical research. At the same time, companies like OpenAI are enabling analysis of genetic data and family history to estimate disease risk. Preventive care is becoming continuous, personalized and data-driven.
As Eric Topol writes in Deep Medicine, “the convergence of human and artificial intelligence will be a powerful force for transforming medicine.” The reality, however, is messier.
AI systems can hallucinate, producing confident but incorrect conclusions that push users toward unnecessary tests or false reassurance. And even when the insights are accurate, a deeper contradiction remains. As robots and time-saving technologies remove friction from daily life, they also remove movement, replacing activity with convenience. We may build systems that precisely track our health, only to discover they mostly document a sedentary lifestyle … one where we sit on the couch, binge-watching the latest Bridgerton series or playing GTA.
