Be Curious, Not Judgmental
Ruminations and musings about healthcare AI, technology, and strategy
Category: Technology
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The Jagged Frontier of Medical AI
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Anthropic published a report recently called “When AI builds itself,” signaling that they are seeing early signs of recursive self-improvement: AI systems starting to build the next AI systems and a possible speedup in the march toward AGI. But even in their most aggressive takeoff scenario, they make a concession about where all that speed runs out: Achieving recursive improvement alone does not suggest an immediate change in how industrial… Read more
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An Audience of One
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Rick Rubin’s philosophy of creating something truly for yourself is an inspiration for this AI era. “The audience comes last… I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.” That’s a strange standard to hold software to. Software was the opposite of personal art. It… Read more
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Dear Tim
Tim Cook steps down as Apple’s CEO on September 1, 2026, and John Ternus takes over. Many of the recaps of the Cook era will lead with the iPhone, services, and the trillions of dollars of market cap. Far fewer will take seriously the claim he made to Jim Cramer in January 2019: “I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the… Read more
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The Patient Will See You Now
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For two decades, technology has expanded patient agency over information. Search put medical knowledge in the browser. Wearables put physiology on the wrist. LLMs put explanation on demand. All of that mattered, but none of it changed where medicine begins. Patients became better informed participants in institutional care. They could read more, track more, and ask better questions. But the choreography around the patient stayed the same. The system initiated.… Read more
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LumiHealth: What Building a National Health Game Taught Me About Behavior Change
A toast to the program I built at Apple with Singapore — and a case for why wellness is infrastructure, not a nice-to-have. Tim Cook once said, “If you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, ‘What was Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind?’ It will be about health.” I used to think about that line often when I worked at Apple. And it… Read more
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The Blinking Cursor Returns: Finding My Childhood in the AI Agent Era
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There’s a cursor blinking at me from my terminal. White text on black, minimal, waiting. It reminds me of sitting in front of my Commodore 64 decades ago—same patient expectation before the first keystroke. I’m 10 years old again. The weird part is: the command line is back—not because UX failed, but because intelligence makes friction survivable. The agent is the new GUI. Why AI Agents Bring Back the Command… Read more
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A Year of Talking to Computers
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I built four iOS apps in the last month. Orbit, a personal CRM Visit Notes, an AI scribe Mosaic, an Apple Watch explorer Curator, a photo album app They’re not masterpieces. They’re real enough to be useful, real enough to be a little embarrassing in places, and real enough to teach me (again) that software is mostly an endless series of small decisions. I’m still slightly surprised that this is… Read more
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Yippee-Ki-Yay, Paper Clipboard
Checking in for a doctor’s appointment still feels like time‑travel to the 1990s for most patients. You step up to the reception desk, are handed a clipboard stacked with half a dozen forms, then pass over your driver’s license and an insurance card so someone can photocopy them. You balance the board on your knee in an uncomfortable chair, rewriting your address, employer, and allergies—information that already lives somewhere on… Read more
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Health Privacy in the AI Era
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Sam Altman hardly ever breaks stride when he talks about ChatGPT, yet in a recent podcast he paused to deliver a blunt warning, which caused my ears to perk up. A therapist might promise that what you confess stays in the room, Sam said, but an AI chatbot cannot, at least not based on the current legal framework. With ~20% of Americans asking an AI chatbot about health monthly (and… Read more
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Level‑5 Healthcare: Why Prescribing Will Decide When AI Becomes a Real Doctor
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Every week seems to bring another paper or podcast trumpeting the rise of diagnostic AI. Google DeepMind’s latest pre‑print on its Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) is a good example: the model aced a blinded OSCE against human clinicians, but its researchers still set restrictive guardrails, forbidding any individualized medical advice and routing every draft plan to an overseeing physician for sign‑off. In other words, even one of the most advanced AI clinical systems… Read more