There’s a broad consensus that AI is changing healthcare quickly. A wide range of applications, from diagnosis to drug discovery, are helping Western medicine to thrive in the twenty-first century. We stand to inherit longer lifespans, and longer ‘healthspans,’ as longevity experts call those fruitful years when a person has a high quality of life.

I was reading this article from the Harvard Gazette last March , where writer Alvin Powell referred to “machine healing,” by which I understood him to mean: the junction of medicine and AI.

“Some compare the potential impact with the decoding of the human genome, even the rise of the internet,” Powell wrote. “The impact is expected to show up in doctor-patient interactions, physicians’ paperwork load, hospital and physician practice administration, medical research, and medical education.”

AI, he notes, is poised to help out with a “crunch” in patient care, to support a “tottering edifice” where physician burnout is just one element of the problem.

How else is AI playing a role?

Well, the format of modern medicine is also changing.

At a recent Imagination in Action TED Talk event, (that I help to host,) there was a presentation by Nancy Oriol, a physician and educator with a history as a Harvard-trained anesthesiologist. Since then, she has helped to create a roving clinic called the “family van” that treats those in low-income areas, those underserved by conventional health networks.

“I'm an early adopter,” Oriol said. “I had one of the early Macintosh computers. I'm an AI optimist. I believe in technology. I believe in data. I believe in innovation. So I should be here to cheer the AI revolution, to say ‘faster, bigger, more data, more scale.’ But I'm not. I'm here to make a case for something older, simpler, and more urgent. Low tech, high touch, human to human.”

Oriol spoke about having dyslexia, and what that has taught her about overcoming obstacles. That, she said, feeds into her inspiration around delivering medical care.

“Dyslexia taught me to see the whole picture, not just the parts,” she said, “and that is how I read, and that is how I came to be a doctor. My dyslexia also inspired me to find a new way to teach.”

She talked about a scenario where students participate in a real-time lab process with a realistic mannequin and try to “save a life.”

“This way of teaching is totally new, and has changed our students,” she said. “What's amazing is that it's not the fancy mannequin that makes it work; it's that it's hands-on, and that there's a skilled teacher in the room watching students and knowing just when to step in.”

In going over a lot of the fundamental aspects of modern patient are, Oriol treaded a path similar to what I have heard from many others: about the things that AI is good at, like math and coding, and things it is not good at, like street-level human interactions, and real-time, real-world perception in nuance.

“Human problems require human presence,” she said.

Here’s Oriol’s conclusion:

“In the age of AI, the most revolutionary thing we can do might be the simplest thing we can do,” she said, painting a picture to go with the point. “Somewhere in Boston right now, there’s a community worker standing on a street corner, listening to someone saying, ‘I'm just tired.’ She may just save their life. AI can do many things, but it cannot replace what happens when one human looks at another and says, ‘I see you. You matter. I'm here for you.’ That is the future we can bring, and that is the revolution I'm inviting you to join.”

Let’s keep all of this in mind as we forge ahead into the future with AI.