Day two of the 2025 Healthcare Design Conference + Expo, held Oct. 25-28 in Kansas City, Mo., featured a keynote address by Jamie Metzl, futurist and author of “Superconvergence: AI, Genetics, and Biotechnology Will Transform Our World.” Speaking to attendees, Metzl said the true power of technology like artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is in how it can act as an extension of the human imagination to accelerate the advancement of civilization.
“The primary story of technology is the unleashing of human brain power at scale, and it’s not just humans being smarter. It’s that now we are connected to each other through these vast networks,” he said. “Every person wakes up every morning having access to all of the solutions to the problems that have already been solved by humans,” which unleashes the human imagination to do “other miraculous things,” he added.
The advancement of AI, he said, marks the latest era in human civilization, made possible by advancements in every previous era, including the agricultural era, when humans developed tools and technology to ease the burden of hunting and gathering so they could devote more of their imaginations to other ways to improve their lives.
In the same way, AI can be utilized to do more of the tasks better suited for computers and machines, such as monitoring and documenting, so that people can focus on human tasks and solving human problems, he said.
For healthcare and any industry, deciding where and how to utilize technology comes down to core values, he said. “The first questions are: ‘Who are we? What do we stand for? What are we trying to achieve?’ And then: ‘What’s the best combination of humans and machines and culture that can help us best achieve that?’”
He closed the keynote session by challenging healthcare designers to use technology to “unlock a remarkable new era of human productivity and connection.”
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