Every day, it seems like there is another headline about the ways in which technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, will disrupt life as we know it.
What jobs will it take? Who will it replace? What will it ultimately change forever?
Amid mass layoffs and economic uncertainty, these concerns aren’t unwarranted. We’re right to ask hard questions about where these emerging technologies are headed. But the headlines don’t always depict the full story. While there is indeed a lot of fear around AI, it does not have to be a force of inequality. It can also be an incredible form of access.
What History Teaches Us
This isn’t the first time society as a whole has felt anxious about new technologies, and it likely won’t be the last. When computers entered the mainstream in the 20th century, many were worried that they would render the human workforce entirely obsolete. Those fears were understandable, as computers, and later the Internet, did change the way we work and forced people to adapt.
But they also provided access to information at a scale we had never seen before.
With the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991, a global information exchange was born. Now, more than thirty years later, so many of us can access knowledge at any time, almost anywhere that we may have never found otherwise. We have more information at our fingertips than previous generations had in entire libraries.
The Democratizing Power of Technology
But access to information alone cannot solve the systemic gaps that make critical services easier to reach for some than others.
Someone may be able to search their symptoms online, but still struggle to access treatment. A student may be able to find a lesson on the internet, but still needs personalized support to understand it.
That’s where AI comes in. If designed responsibly, it has the potential to democratize access to expert guidance in areas like healthcare, education and financial services that have historically been limited to the select few.
One company, Squirrel AI, is changing the game when it comes to education. Founder Derek Haoyang Li designed an adaptive AI tutoring system that identifies gaps in a student’s fundamental knowledge, especially the prerequisite concepts that keep them from progressing in their lessons. Once the platform spots those cracks, it customizes lessons in real time from student to student. The K-12 tutor is offered at a fraction of the cost of a traditional human tutor, and is designed to be accessible for students in remote and rural areas in China, so that they can learn the same content as their peers.
One of the fundamental promises of AI is in its ability to sort through huge data sets and gather insights that would otherwise take hours to organize. That capability is exactly what makes it particularly well-suited for financial services.
Latin America has one of the world’s largest unbanked populations. Fintech company Nubank was founded to serve underbanked and unbanked people, and is now rolling out its strategy to use AI to democratize financial advice. Nubank recently shared that it is developing an AI Private Banker intended to help customers organize their finances, manage debt and make better credit decisions, the kind of support that has traditionally been available only at a premium.
Where AI Can Extend Medical Expertise
For me, though, the clearest example is healthcare.
Six years ago, I got sick. I was dealing with prostatitis, chronic insomnia, chronic pain and nerve damage. I had access to resources that most people don’t have, and still, I struggled to connect the dots between symptoms.
For billions of people, even that first layer of guidance is out of reach. The World Economic Forum estimates that 4.5 billion people still lack access to essential healthcare services and that by 2030, we’ll face a projected shortfall of 11 million healthcare workers, only making the problem worse.
The good news? AI is already expanding access to specialist-level care and decentralizing expertise.
It is able to translate complex, clinically reviewed, evidence-based medical information into terms patients can actually understand and use. For many people, the barrier is health literacy, language or time. AI can help clinicians and healthcare organizations adapt information for different literacy levels, languages and cultural contexts, reaching patient populations that have historically faced barriers to understandable health guidance.
As a serial entrepreneur, I wanted to be a part of this solution in a meaningful way. I was born in South Africa and started my entrepreneurial journey in technology and telecommunications. Since then, I have built companies across different industries, with a continued focus on creating value at scale. I wanted to use that experience to combine what I wished I had access to during my own medical journey with what was available to me, but still out of reach for the masses.
So, I created the first of its kind AI-powered health and longevity super app, AverCare, that focuses on one thing and one thing only: access. It’s multilingual, so we can serve people across countries. We’ve also partnered with some of the best medical specialists in the world, who believe in providing world-class access to care as a basic human right.
AI can and should be used for good. At the end of the day, we humans are the ones deciding which problems are worth solving with the new technological capabilities at our disposal.
We can build tools that serve only the few, or we can provide access to the many. The choice is ours.
Featured image by Bella Ka Pang/Shutterstock
