Speaker 1: Transcriber's Name Priya Prashanth Department of Humanities Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati Are people born destined to become a doctor? Or does something happen in their lives that drives them towards this profession? My parents say that it's something that I had always wanted to be. And I have memories growing up in a small English seaside town where I would spend hours in the local library with books on science and biology all in the hope of trying to understand this amazing machine that we have, this human body in better detail. And on one particular occurrence, I remember after a series of really bad headaches, I found a textbook on the brain and neurology. And in it was a diagram which had questions, symptoms connected to answers. And as I spent a few moments following the lines down, I was able to diagnose myself with a migraine. How proud I felt when my mom took me to see my family doctor and I told him that I had arrived at that diagnosis. But isn't this essentially what medicine is? Having this learned source of knowledge ask us a series of questions, narrowing down further and further until an answer is reached. A doctor is just a person who, in this case, has spent years studying all they can about the human body and therefore in that position to ask these questions. So if medicine is essentially an exercise of data assimilation and recognition based on patterns, doesn't it make logical sense that the very same can be done by a machine? This is where we're at today, on this cusp of a medical revolution which is being driven through technology. Folks, I'd like to take you all on a journey now, a journey into the future, in our minds to visit the year 2030 and see what the inside of an operating theater may look like. A patient lies on the operating table. She's asleep under general anesthesia. And this incredibly strange looking metallic structure is leaning over her. It's a robotic surgeon. It's got multiple limbs. It's got this circular bulbous appendage, almost like a head at its top. And as that blue light wafts itself over the patient's body, it takes a phenomenally detailed series of images for her internal organs. Now a surgical arm comes just above the abdomen and it stops and it proceeds to make two small, near perfect incisions. And as it does so, the camera probe now enters in and it follows this preset path which was set days before by the imaging team. It stops when it identifies the organ and the surgical tool comes in. And over the next 20 minutes, as this entire operation is taking place, to us sitting on the outside, it's like watching this really seasoned conductor orchestrate a beautiful musical. Whilst the machine begins to close up, a nurse assistant sits and she puts bandages and cleans the wounds. And in the corner is a lonely human surgeon, sitting remotely at his desk, just there in case of an emergency. He puts his head up to check everything's okay and then back down into his crossword puzzle and coffee. You see, this is what the future of surgery will look like. And in a book in which I'm writing about the future of health, looking at technologies in 2030, technology, being the central tenet, is set to become more encompassing, much, much more smarter, and a whole load more personalized. You see, the digital signatures of every machine and device that we touch, we use, will be increasingly used to navigate the way we lead our lives. Just think about the way Apple's Siri has already transformed the way most of you use your mobile phones to search for things. The way Amazon's Alexa is slowly beginning to change the way we interact and engage with our homes. And what would a health concierge of the future look like? A digital, personalized health assistant. When we wake up, all of the biological outputs of our bodies are analyzed and assessed to give an indication of our internal biochemistry. The devices which are planted under our skins are sending this constant stream of data into this personalized health cloud. And as that information is analyzed, packets are sent to the various devices that we have in our lives. Our schedulers are instructed on exactly the right amount of exercise we should be doing. Our CPUs, culinary planning units, are told how much food and nutrition we should be consuming. When we're sick, our doctors are told, or our spouses are informed, of what our health status is. The autonomous taxi service which we may use for going to work will be told to stop two blocks before we get there, all in the hope of incentivizing us to get out, walk, and earn extra health points. And the purpose of these points? They will calculate our insurance premiums. They may even be gatekeepers for access to certain services and facilities. And even if the future is not as somewhat dark or intrusive as I've just described, what I am certain of is that by the year 2030, 90% of all of your medical consultations will happen with a computer. I don't mean that you and your doctor will be separated by distance but connected over the internet. I mean that you'll actually have that consultation with an artificially intelligent system which will ask you a series of questions and then recommend treatment. We may think that this future is somewhat a decade or so away, but in reality, it's actually much closer than we realize. For even today, there are medical decisions which are being made by smart algorithms and not by medical doctors. The best known is IBM Watson. This is a $4 billion machine. The tagline beautifully reads, a cognitive system representing a new partnership between humans and computers. IBM Watson dabbles in genomics. It assists us in cancer diagnosis. And a very interesting study which was conducted last year between the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the USA and our very own Manipal Hospital here in Bangalore in India actually showed the machine was correctly able to diagnose breast cancer in 75% of patients. In the United Kingdom, there is a very exciting new startup working through the NHS which is augmenting patients' experiences of consultations with their doctors. What it does is it layers an artificially intelligent chatbot asking the patient a series of questions to triage their severity and then is in a position to make basic recommendations all in the hope of saving the time of the more expensive human substitute. Here in India too, with your very own mobile phones, there are a plethora of mobile applications which are available to help you all with your well-being needs and help you manage your diseases. So in this entire digital revolution in healthcare that I've just described, we understand that technology is augmenting health. But what is it doing to care? You see, the doctor-patient relationship is one of the oldest forms of professional rapport which exists. It's often revered to as being sacred. But what does this relationship mean? What role does it play in healing and recovery? Just take a moment and think about the time that you went to see your doctor. You're in pain, you're suffering, you're ill, you're in this incredibly vulnerable position and all you're asking is that this other human in front of you provides relief. Now I know this is a somewhat romanticized and privileged view of medicine, but if you think about it, I'm sure we've all experienced it at some point in our lives. So what happens to this equation when the doctor is no longer part of that? Trust is the foundation of every successful relationship. And trust is either built over a period of time by knowing your doctor or trust in the profession itself. But where will this trust now reside once the doctor is no longer there? Will it exist in the machine? Will it exist in its manufacturer? And are we ready? Are we ready to trust in something in which we cannot form a relationship with? Friends, I am an eternal optimist. I am incredibly, incredibly excited about what the future holds for us. And whilst we have so many global challenges to overcome as a society, technology is set to revolutionize our personal and professional lives. And I may be biased, but I think that the impact that this will have on our health will be unlike anything we've ever seen before. As the worlds of technology, of medicine, of biology, all become increasingly integrated into this machine of ours, this human body, I hope that the new trinity which will exist in our lives, the doctor-computer-patient relationship, will actually augment our experiences rather than replacing them. And I hope that we take a moment to design for trust and we can capture what the essence is of being a human, where we continue to build technologies which we create based on our intelligence, but which we design based on our emotions. And so I leave you with a thought that the next time you see your doctor and you hear, trust me, I'm a doctor, I recommend you smile and you cherish that moment, for who knows how many we have left. Thank you.