Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Predicting the Scientific Future: From UCSF's Robert Wachter

Robert Wachter of UCSF is both a medical leader and a futurist. In his newest book, A GIANT LEAP, he discusses AI in medical care.  From his early AI experiences in 2022, he extracted the following.

The story of whether AI would finally transform healthcare would mostly be about whether the healthcare system could implement these tools in ways that would produce better outcomes for patients, lower costs, and some relief for beleaguered doctors and nurses. 

And that, in turn, would be determined -- as much by history, politics, economics, pride, regulations, leadership, lawsuits, guilds, culture, workflows, inertia, greed, hubris, vibes, and zeitgeist as by graphics processing units, diffusion models, and neural networks.


Wachter, A Giant Leap, 2/2026, Preface.