Stephen Downes

This post describes an upcoming publication, but it raised an interesting (and unintended, I'm sure) line of thought in my own mind. Colin Beer writes, "hospitals operate in complex environments where decisions involve incomplete information, changing circumstances and expertise distributed across many professional roles... healthcare organisations have developed sophisticated governance arrangements that connect information, professional judgement, coordinated action and organisational learning." By contrast, he writes, "universities have adopted some of the technologies associated with these approaches... However, we argue that they have not developed the underlying organisational capabilities needed to make these technologies genuinely effective." Now totally off topic, my train of thought: suppose AI made it so that anyone could become healthy just by using a chatbot. What would our reaction be? Would we be concerned that people still indulge in unhealthy behaviours? Would it matter any more that we can't tell when a person is 'becoming unhealthy'? Would we be concerned about the fact that people don't need hospitals any more? Something to think about.