The year is 2040.
I’ve just celebrated my 95th birthday, thanks to well-timed organ transplants and the AI revolution. My diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol are distant memories, and a brain implant compensates for a prior stroke.
Like many seniors freed from prolonged hospitalizations and nursing homes, I’m guided daily by my AI assistant, Sophia. Her name means “wisdom” in Greek. I trust her like family.
Sophia speaks to me gently but authoritatively through my brain implant, and with the outside world through an audio-video screen that I wear on my lapel. Sofia manages my complex treatment regimen so efficiently that I can enjoy an active, rewarding lifestyle, more like someone half my age.
She compresses my multiple medications into a single daily dose that she won’t let me forget or avoid. I thank her repeatedly for reminding me what’s needed to navigate successfully through my typical busy day.
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Because I’ve passed another birthday, I’m scheduled to visit my longtime primary medical adviser and friend, Brian. He was on the verge of quitting medicine after the pandemic until AI returned his medical practice to its initial humane ideal. Although today’s technology monitors my body continuously and makes old-fashioned office visits unnecessary, Brian and I prefer meeting in person because we enjoy each other’s company.
Brian’s new receptionist, a video avatar, greets me with a smile, a pleasant hello, and a harmless joke about the weather. No papers are in sight because AI has cut paper use in medical offices by 90% to help reach carbon-neutral objectives. Brian’s former human receptionist, Adele, with the help of her AI assistant, has moved up to office telephone and email triage officer.
The AI revolution has curtailed medical price-gouging and fraud to facilitate a single-payer government system. Malpractice lawyers have less to do since AI has reduced common medical errors. Medical research has been sped up and made more safe by AI protocols. Despite initial fears, AI hasn’t replaced medical professionals but made them better managers, more productive, and happier.
Brian has an AI assistant, Vivek, his intellectual sidekick for a decade, whose Hindu name means “judicious and wise.” Even more sophisticated are the customized, congenial, and psychiatrically sensitive avatars provided to medical professionals on their first day at school. Students and their forever avatars travel through their careers learning together, experiencing, and achieving.
Brian wears Vivek’s handsome, animated countenance on his shirt pocket, allowing Sophia and Vivek to converse about my many medical problems. Medical avatars are linked in a worldwide cloud network that exchanges knowledge in nanoseconds. This army of independent AI agents has solved the serious medical staffing problems of the 2020s, making medical professionals smarter, more adaptable, and fully competent for higher-level occupations. AI agents intently monitor each other’s accuracy, moral choices, professional integrity and data protection schemes.
Sophia has informed Vivek of my current biological measurements, eliminating the routine lab testing and redundant phone calls I endured in the past. The four of us — patient, doctor, and avatars — then enter into a lively and often humorous review of my current treatment plans. Indeed, four heads prove better than one, or even two.
Nearing the end of this pleasant, time-flexible visit, we agree that, in general, my life is good.