I fell in love with technology when I wrote my first computer program at age 14 when there was no public Internet, no personal computers, no iPhone, no cloud. I have made technical contributions to every era of computing from mainframes, to PCs, Internet, Cloud, and now AI. I was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering. AI currently surpasses my wildest imagination on the art of what’s possible. I'm still passionately working in technology at Google focused on how to live healthier lives. I believe we can make AI the telescope of the future, to helping everyone live long and healthy lives.
I wrote...
AI-First Healthcare: AI Applications in the Business and Clinical Management of Health
This book explores how AI is transforming healthcare and the potential benefits it can bring to patients and doctors.
The author, Eric, is a cardiologist with working knowledge of technology of AI. I love how he describes with clarity, the present and potential to make people healthier with AI First thinking. That is, how AI can make the business of health care human.
I love the premise and basis of Eric’ thinking that we can make healthcare personalized, proactive, anticipatory, helping people live healthier lives and reducing the cost of healthcare.
At the same time he is mindful that AI could be used to dehumanize healthcare and exacerbate existing inequalities.
A visit to a physician these days is cold: physicians spend most of their time typing at computers, making minimal eye contact. Appointments generally last only a few minutes, with scarce time for the doctor to connect to a patient's story, or explain how and why different procedures and treatments might be undertaken. As a result, errors abound: indeed, misdiagnosis is the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States, trailing only heart disease, cancer, and stroke. This is because, despite having access to more resources than ever, doctors are vulnerable not just to the economic demand to see more…
I met Dr. Wachter, at the University of California in San Francisco and we were discussing the applicability of technology in a patient’s hospital room to improve care.
I was introduced to his book and was mesmorized. It was one of my early conversations from a clinician stressing that we need technology, computers to be invisible not irresistible in healthcare.
He writes compelling stories about medical errors which only by the stroke of luck didn’t cause a fatality. It reminded me of my sister-in-law who was misdiagnosed as being Type 2 diabetes when she was Type 1.
This misdiagnosis could have proved fatal. The proper use of AI, especially the current wave of generative AI could have made a huge difference.
The New York Times Science Bestseller from Robert Wachter, Modern Healthcare's #1 Most Influential Physician-Executive in the US
While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills.
But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization - until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, healthcare has finally gone digital.
Yet once clinicians started using computers to actually deliver care, it dawned on them that something was deeply wrong.…
The opening paragraph of this book is pure poetry in motion, putting me in a trance and craving to read the entire book.
You wouldn’t know this is a book about neuroscience when reading the opening lines in Chapter 1. Connectome is a thought-provoking exploration of the brain's neural connections and their potential to transform our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
Given that artificial intelligence is inspired by neuroscience it’s a great book to understand how the brain works.
Connectome, by Sebastian Seung is 'One of the most eagerly awaited scientific books of the year ... intellectually exhilarating, beautifully written, exquisitely precise yet still managing to be inspirational' Irish Times
What really makes us who we are? In this groundbreaking book, pioneering neuroscientist Sebastian Seung shows that our identity does not lie in our genes, but in the connections between our brain cells - our own particular wiring, or 'connectomes'.
Everything about us - emotions, thoughts, memories - is encoded in these tangled patterns of neural connections, and now Seung and a dedicated team are mapping them in order…
Parag is a clinician who covers the current and future state for using AI in several healthcare specialties like cardiology, pharmacy, orthopedics, radiology, and many more.
This is a book for generalists who want to understand how AI applies to a variety of medical disciplines. I enjoyed this book because it deepened my knowledge as an AI technologist on how to apply AI in areas of healthcare from the lens of a physician.
I must confess the book title drew me to the book as I sought to understand and learn more about the ethics of the misuse of AI.
Having worked on committees in the AU and advised various entities in the United States, the subject of ethics is front and center. The expanding use of large language models and rise of generative AI makes the potential for harm stronger than ever.
AI is poised to change our lives and society in ways we have not imagined much like the iPhone when it first arrived. Understanding its potential is useful but understanding its potential for harm is mandatory.
I found this book to be enlightening on the ethical components of AI and technology.
AI First Healthcare is a book about how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to improve healthcare. The book is written for a general audience, and it does not require prior knowledge of AI. It provides a comprehensive overview of the use of AI in healthcare. AI-First Healthcare is a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning how AI can transform healthcare delivery and patient care. It’s also a great read for anyone wanting to understand AI.
AI is poised to transform every aspect of healthcare, including the way we manage personal health, from customer experience and clinical care to healthcare cost reductions. This practical book is one of the first to describe present and future use cases where AI can help solve healthcare problems.
My core value is realistic education—learning from each other’s errors and successes, but with full awareness of the difference between the determined past and the uncertain future. We can benefit from uncertainty, which I’ve been doing for a living as an engineer, academic researcher, and inventor. I make use of knowledge and science as much as possible, but I also know that strategic decisions for the uncertain future require skepticism and thinking to deal with the differences in a new circumstance. With my core value, I am passionate about sharing insights and knowledge that our formal education does not provide.
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even benefit from uncertainty by skeptical thinking, strategic decisions, and teamwork based on enlightened self-interests.
This bottom-up thinking is thought-provoking for leaders who wish to build teams rather than herds. The insights in the book will help you to be better prepared for the unexpected, less likely to conform when you…
Trial, Error, and Success: 10 Insights into Realistic Knowledge, Thinking, and Emotional Intelligence
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success. They didn't teach you this in school, even though you should know why the rigid laws of physics don't rule nature and don't inhibit your free-will decisions to try, fail, and succeed. As a guide to success, this book shows how skepticism, prudent use of science, and thinking lead to strategic decisions for the uncertain future.
Presenting real-life examples, the thinking in the book combines sharp analyses with broad analogies to show:
How to identify realistic knowledge and avoid harm due to overgeneralized concepts.
How to create new knowledge and solve…
