How AI can help you become healthier — in conversation with Eka Care

In conversation with Eka Care, Dr Bakshi argues that AI may reverse a fifty-year trend that pulled healthcare inside the hospital. What follows is an edited transcript of his answer.

Looking forward, I think there is going to be a reversal of trend, or at least an opportunity to reverse one. The trend I mean is the concentration of healthcare into the hospital, which happened over the last fifty years because of the diagnostics and the treatment methods we were talking about.

AI is a complicated term, so let me simplify it. What happened in the dot-com period is that knowledge became available to everybody. You could go to a website and look something up. You no longer needed a library or access to a particular textbook. At least entry-level knowledge was available to anyone. What mobile did was add one thing: it put that in your pocket, so you did not even need a desktop. And it did something else powerful. It connected eight billion people through one ten-digit number. I can dial somebody in Brazil. I can dial somebody in Costa Rica. It does not matter.

Now think of it this way. Intelligence is available on tap.

What does that mean? Information is only an input into an action. As a neuroscientist I studied this closely: intelligence is not just problem solving. It is perceiving, deciding on that perception, and acting. All three together. You understand what is happening in the world, you process it, and you decide on an action. So intelligence that leads to an action is now available on tap.

That is the theory. Come to the practical. What does it mean for healthcare?

We are living at a time when chronic disease affects almost everybody. Look at the statistics: past the age of sixty, there will be at least one condition, maybe two, maybe four. Hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, obesity. It is in every family, in any country you choose. India, a middle-income country. The United States. Developed markets. It is there.

What does the hospital-based or clinic-based model have to offer against that? Come to me once in two months, I will see you, I will write a prescription, and you figure it out. That is knowledge, but it is not action.

What AI makes possible is that you can ask an agent: I am doing this, is it right or wrong? And that agent can watch your sleep, your food, your physical activity, and tell you that you have not moved enough, that you are hypertensive and eating too much salt, that you are diabetic and have just had something you should compensate for this evening, and here is how. More like a coach.

So there is an opportunity to build things that let healthcare become health. Healthcare means you fall sick first, and then you come to us, to a doctor or a hospital. Health means you are thirty and well, and the question is how you stay well until you are seventy, rather than falling into hypertension or diabetes or lung cancer by the time you are forty-five.

What I expect is that you will still need hospitals. Hospitals become more complex and more sophisticated, and you go to one only for a major procedure, a real correction to your anatomy or your physiology, whichever organ system is at fault. After that you go home quickly. Then you rely on these intelligences, in whatever form they take. Coaches. Monitoring systems. Robots, particularly if you are elderly. Japan is already struggling with elderly care, and it is the most advanced country in robotics.

All of these intelligences, in their different embodiments, will let you live a normal, healthier life for far longer than our parents' generation managed. I am already fifty-five, so I am hoping that by the time I reach the threshold where chronic disease sets in, we have this army of agents around us, helping us take the actions that lead to a healthier life. Not just go and read a blog, find a recipe and cook it. That takes an enormous amount of motivation.