AI’s blindspot and the Blue Ocean of innovation this represents
In the rapidly evolving landscape of healthcare, the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands at a crossroads, limited not by its capability but by the data it learns from. Today’s healthcare system is rich in billing and disease management data, yet it barely scratches the surface of what constitutes true health. Real health data (AI’s blindspot)—encompassing everything from daily movement, nutrition, and air quality to laughter, salaries and social bonds—is largely untapped, residing not in medical records but in the lived experiences of individuals. Solving for this blindspot offers a blue ocean of innovation and provides a strategy to support AI alignment into perpetuity.
As we navigate our health journeys with the hope of avoiding illness, the lesson is clear: hope is not a strategy. The story of Steve Jobs, ending in a tragic pancreatic cancer experience, reminds us that without a deep, nuanced understanding of the ebb and flow of our health, we are left vulnerable. Annually, over 60,000 people in the US are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and yet, many more successfully navigate away from this outcome. What is the difference? What combination of events are net contributors and what combination of events are net detractors from such a devastating diagnosis?
Transforming physical health expression into digital health
The majority of pancreatic cancer cases are sporadic. This suggests we cannot look to family history for blame. The key to unlocking the mysteries of many diseases lies in the vast, physical events of our daily lives—the thousands of parameters that define the ebb and flow of our health expression. Though AI is undaunted when asked to sort out the difference between hundreds of thousands of parameters, it is powerless in the face of physical phenomena. AI only operates in zeros and ones. Thankfully, there is an ever-expanding suite of apps and wearables that will faithfully generate digital representations of physical experiences in clinically-meaningful ways. These transform our physical health expression into digital health ready for AI consumption.
Creating safe and effective ways of supporting the masses to digitize the minutiae of their lives represents a new relationship with our citizenry; a blue ocean of innovation. In this new era, citizens are not “on standing-by”, waiting for illness to strike. Instead, technology provides easy to use and ultra-safe solutions for active participation and distribution of follow-on value production. Here individuals deliberately co-produce health intelligence via collective pools of health data, transforming steps, meals, air quality and more into digital insights.
The three zone model
What does this look like? A three zone model is detailed in Wealthcare: Demystifying Web3 and the Rise of Personal Data Economies but we can use this simple summary below.
Zone I: is home base, a longitudinal personal record or repository for individuals to safely and securely self-custody their personal information.
Zone II: is a continuous correlation AI that is non-rivalrous in every way but can answer with up to the minute precision regarding the level of correlation various parameters have to specific health futures.
Zone III: is everybody else, governments, researchers, industry, those who would benefit from crowd specific insights. This zone is deliberately separated from the lower zones such that only pre-approved correlation insights are served up to this commercial zone. Access to the individual identities behind the insights is protected.
Personal & public ai
What Jobs needed was to exist among a large crowd packing thousands of parameters that detailed the sequential minutiae of their lives. Each individual would have a personal digital fiduciary (personal AI) to manage, sort and retrieve information as needed as well as manage pre-approvals for participation in various data marketplaces thus providing both health intelligence and economic returns for access to personal data.
A general (public AI) continuous correlation AI (Zone II) could have scanned the home bases for factors that may combine in potentially health-harming ways. Thus Zone II might have warned Jobs that he was swimming in a lane in which pancreatic cancer was a possibility.
Perhaps the cumulative effects of red meat, radiation from frequent international flights, repeat exposure to poor air quality overseas and a regular dose of pesticides from diligent lawn service might combine to meet a threshold consistent with the development of pancreatic cancer. Clearly these are hypotheticals. Today we simply do not know. Individuals pay the ultimate price for our grossly limited health intelligence.
Life is complex. The ebb and flow of health is subject to many parameters. The point is, with the help of our planetary cohabitants, we can digitize representative samples of these co-occurrences and using modern AI approaches generate personally-relevant insights in time to make a difference.
The blue ocean of innovation
Denmark’s recent success with large language models predicting health outcomes more accurately than ever before is just a glimpse of what’s possible. In Denmark, the citizenry trust their government and regularly provide information about personal life-events related to health, education, occupation, income, address, working hours and more all recorded with day-to-day resolution. Here’s where the problem lies. This behavior does not scale beyond Denmark. Expecting people to digitize the minutiae of their lives and deliver this level of detail to governments or industry is an idea dead on arrival in most locations throughout the globe.
Enter a blue ocean of innovation. Here technology forges the way for a revolutionary partnership between individuals, researchers, governments and industry. Together, stakeholders embrace a model that solves AI’s blindspot, ensures data protection and leverages the power of AI for the greater good while supporting Al alignment into perpetuity.
Here’s a snapshot of benefits to key stakeholders.
Individual citizens have the option to access highly personalized and predictive health intelligence that informs both potential adverse events and the detailed strategy to avoid these while gaining economic benefit from participating in data marketplaces. As automation impacts jobs, citizens find purpose and meaning in deliberately digitizing and monetizing the ebb and flow of their life, leaving a value-backed legacy for future generations.
Governments could standardize data protection at the level of the citizen. No longer would they need to decipher the data gymnastics proposed per project. Governments could simply declare that for access to project funding, the data must comply with the 3-zone model in order to ensure trusted approvals for access to insights occurs with robust individual protections in place each and every time.
Providers could have access to medical-grade reliable documentation on patients regardless of which health centers across the globe might have been involved in past healthcare visits.
Payers’ predictive capacity would improve by a wide margin. The ability to identify valid claims from fraudulent claims would be robust. Additionally, payers could support new incentive models to optimize patient engagement in healthy behaviors. Gone are the days of tracking steps for health benefits. Now we track our steps to provide contextual data and maximize the economic benefit of our lipid panels etc. within various data marketplaces.
Researchers and Pharma are deeply concerned that the single target therapeutic opportunities have largely been tapped. What remains is a morass of complex multi-target diseases (think cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s etc.) The next series of therapeutics will depend upon solving AI’s blindspot.
In short, AI is here.
Advances are marching at an unprecedented rate while a huge and vital blind spot persists in the training data. We cannot back engineer health from disease data and AI’s blind spot is not something a single sector can fix. It requires mass-participation in the co-creation of health intelligence at the pace of change. How we get this done represents a blue ocean of innovative partnerships between the stakeholders. Together we can shift from passive hope to active strategy and unlock the full potential of AI.
It’s time to embrace this blue ocean of innovation, where the once unknowable becomes known, empowering us all with the insights needed to shape our health futures and align AI with humanity into perpetuity.
