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Microsoft captured global attention with a recent announcement that its new artificial intelligence model can outperform doctors in diagnosing diseases. Trained on vast amounts of medical data, the diagnostic AI surpassed physicians in tests across multiple conditions. It marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of healthcare technology and sends a clear message: the future of medicine is here, and its digital. As a physician and health system leader, I welcome the progress. Im a strong believer and advocate for the many use cases of AI in the health space. The technology holds immense potentialcatching illnesses earlier, identifying rare diseases, improving efficiency across healthcare systems, and reducing administrative burden. But as the world races to uncover the possibilities for AI in the health space, the effort must be constantly guided by one core question: What is best for the patient? AI is revolutionizing diagnostics By rapidly analyzing large volumes of patient datasuch as imaging, lab results, clinical notes, and genetic informationAI has the potential to identify patterns that signal disease far faster than traditional diagnostics by a human doctor. As Microsoft demonstrated, these tools are increasingly accurate, and in some cases can outperform clinicians in identifying certain conditions. For example, AI can flag early-stage lung nodules in CT scans that might be overlooked by the human eye, or detect subtle cardiac anomalies across thousands of ECGs in real time. By diagnosing faster and with high precision, AI can reduce diagnostic errors, shorten time to treatment, and support more personalized careespecially when used alongside the necessary clinical judgment of trained physicians. But diagnosis is only the beginning of a patient’s journey No matter how accurate or fast, the diagnosis is just the beginning of a patients journey. A diagnosis is often met with fear and apprehension and comes with tough, potentially life-altering decisions, which can create immense, indeterminate uncertainty. A well-delivered diagnosis isnt just about the condition, but also the “why,” and “whats next.” These are human conversations. They require trust, empathy, and, often, cultural context. Studies show patients still want a human connection and dont yet fully trust AI health information. A 2023 Pew study found that 7 in 10 Americans trust their doctors advice, while only 24% trust AI-generated health information. And 60% said they were uncomfortable with their doctor relying on AI to assist in their care. A more recent study from researchers at the University of Wuerzburg and the University of Cambridge showed that patients lost confidence in doctors if they mentioned or advertised using AI. Many physicians also remain cautious, even as the technology continues to make proven advancements and adoption rates climb. A 2024 Johns Hopkins University (JHU) study found that many doctors still do not trust AI tools, citing opaque decision-making processes, lack of contextual awareness, and liability concerns. Even high-performing models are unable to explain why they reached a certain conclusionsomething unacceptable in clinical care, where accountability is essential. Ask any doctor if theyd trust a “black box” with their patients life and youll get a resounding: No. If AI systems cant explain their reasoningor if they lack sufficient real-world contextphysicians are right to question their use. Trust is the foundation of healthcare systems and the patient-doctor relationship. Advancing too quickly in the AI revolution in health risks undermining it. Closing the AI trust gap Many global hospitals, including King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, where I work, are already deploying AI and exploring new use cases to improve everything from hospital operations and administration to diagnostics. But as AI permeates further into the health field, we need to ensure it’s incorporated responsibly and improves health outcomes for patients. The field is facing a patient-doctor-AI triangle dilemmathe patient needs to trust the doctor, who needs to trust AI. As JHU study shows, transparency and reasoning from AI tools are essential to ensuring doctors understand the technology and trust its recommendations. To truly bridge the gap, AI systems should be built with physicians, not for them. This looks like investing in AI literacy and training programs for doctors, nurses, and medical studentsto improve current implementation and secure health AIs future advancement and sustainability. Strong regulatory frameworks that ensure accountability and patient safety, particularly when it comes to medical and patient data, are essential. One promising real-world initiative is Saudi Arabias Public Investment Funds Humain, an AI agent designed to support healthcare delivery and relieve administrative burdens. Codesigned with medical professionals, Humain integrates into existing teams to enhance the capabilities of health professionals, not replace them. Transparency and reasoning are embedded functions. When rolled out thoughtfully and effectively, these types of health AI initiatives have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of care, particularly in underserved areas lacking health infrastructure and medical professionals. With responsible and collaboratively designed health AI tools, we can take a major step globally towards the democratization of the health sector. The best outcome for patients The future of medicine is not AI versus doctors. Its AI with doctorsa partnership. AI may be better and faster at identifying rare cancers or subtle diagnostic patterns, but only a doctor can consider a patients story, their social context, their fearsand translate a diagnosis into a treatment plan they can understand and embrace. To get there, we must bridge the trust gap between patients, doctors, and technology. If we get this right, we can build a healthcare system that is more accurate, more efficient, more accessible, and more sustainable for the long term.
Category:
E-Commerce
Youre probably a fan of Mschf, even if youve never heard of it. The Brooklyn-based art collective has spent the past five years commandeering the internets attention through product drops like Satan Shoes (Nike Air Maxes filled with blood) and Big Red Boots, alongside community experiments like turning Venmo into a game of Survivor. Mschfs 30ish-person team regularly ruffles the feathers of brands, products, culture, and even its own investors. Over the years, Mschf has faced cease-and-desist orders and lawsuits from the likes of Nike and VF Corp. for turning their products into creative clay. But now Mschf has decided to stop poking fun at brandsat least some of the timeto do business with them. Its launching a creative consultancy, called Applied Mschf, to offer services to between 5 and 10 brands a year, and restructuring its business entirely to support this project. The collective has previously collaborated with companies on one-off products: For Tiffany it made a participation trophy for being rich; for Mattel, it produced a rusted jalopy with “Wash Me” on the window. But Applied Mschf is a much more ambitious and far-reaching effort. Mschf is codifying its servicesincluding marketing, industrial design, digital design, and even architectureas a full-on creative consultancy. Instead of the brands paying their lawyers [to sue us], they should just be paying us, Mschf cofounder and CEO Gabe Whaley tells me, with a laugh. Mschf as a service Mschf spent its early years thumbing its nose at the capitalist establishment. Shortly after launching, the collective began producingat a torrid paceboth tongue-in-cheek collectibles like Kill Pills (theyre just sugar) and groundbreaking art projects like Severed Spots (which cut a $30,000 Damian Hurst dot painting into 88 mini canvases). But the group remained cloaked in mystery. When I followed Mschf to Korea for its first art retrospective in 2023, the collective had amassed a museums worth of work and a global reputation and yet it was still relatively unknown. Today its founders are recognized across the creative community, and the organization’s output is the envy of many brands. Mschf’s eight-figure business is fueled by its now tried-and-true product drops, which include shoes, fashion, collectibles, and art. To launch Applied Mschf, the collective is restructuring into a holding company. The footwear, collectibles, fashion, and art groups each have their own leadership and budget. At the center of everything is Mschf’s legal and central creative team, which will serve all the divisionsincluding the 5 to 10 external clients and partners that Mschf hopes to bring on over the next year. With this mechanism, Whaley and the team want the partners, the revenue, and, quite frankly, the excuse to execute on a larger scale. When I met with cofounder Kevin Wiesner last year, he said he was itching to construct a building. Now Whaley tells me that Wiesner wants to partner with a city to rethink its public transitand he’s not joking. I’m very excited to pursue bigger, harder formats that are potentially more permanent, Whaley says, laying out an intentionally non-prescriptive groundwork to woo partners who have grand, ranging ambitions. Whaley says Applied Mschf’s projects could be cobranded or white-labeled, and may involve everything from consulting to actually spinning up entirely new businesses. He’s open to working on retainer, for royalties, or even taking equity in a new venture. It all sounds quite amorphous, but this kind of creative consultancy is becoming far more established in the modern world of influencer-driven creative direction. Kendrick Lamar, for instance, releases music and videos that define his cultural relevance. But he also has the consultancies pgLang and Project 3 to pursue corporate clients. Whaley points to the late Virgil Ablohs archipelago of companies, clients, and hobbies as a creatively satisfying path to success that Mschf hopes to emulate. Whaley’s also well aware that his company, which defined itself by bucking the consumer system, is now offering to fuel it. At the end of the day, Mschf takes culture as existing materialthat’s our medium. At the most aspirational level, this is really just about expanding our tool kit with available material for us to use, he says. I think a lot of people may think we are anti-big brand based on our past work. But the thing is, there was never animosity. It was just that they had such good existing material. The evolution of Mschf Whaley says that as Mschf has evolved, so has his perspective on its place in culture, especially as he’s met young designers abroad who admire the brand. He’s become more comfortable with his own role in the creative community. These days, Mschfs leadership regularly makes the rounds of design schools and podcasts. We understand that we’re not that secret, mysterious, shadowy behind-the-scenes figure anymore, Whaley says. So the question is, how do we use our existing context to do more and make our world bigger, versus trying to retreat back into the shadows from where we came? For Whaley, Applied Mschf is one part shrewd business move, one part creative necessity, as the team looks to balance its business with the blank space, anything-is-possible ideas that originally propelled the collective. There’s a lot of value now in rejecting this notion of chasing ephemerality, he says. [Ephemerality] was a very special thing that helped characterize our practice for the last half decade. But you see everyone chasing their 15 seconds of fame. We’re all chasing it, but that half-life of attention keeps decreasing. I think it’s a race to the bottom, and I think now is an interesting time to actually focus on things like permanence. And so that’s what’s going to define Mschfs artistic practice in the future: less of these rapid-fire, one-offs every two weeks, but more large, impactful community-driven moments. Mschf has traditionally viewed virality not as the goal of its art practice but the means to an end. Virality created the feedback loop from the fan or consumer who gave its sometimes sophomoric projects a PhD-level meaning. Wiesner has called Mschf a digitally mediated performance art practice, with its core question always being: “Does each viewer-participant of a project make it better? But Mschf now lives inside culture its helped create, where brands themselves are launching wave after wave of nonsensical collabs as part of their core marketing strategy (at the time of filing this story, Coors Light had just announced a refrigerated deodorant). No doubt, Mschf doesnt just want to be the only ephemeral player in on the joke, and its creatives want to continue pushing boundaries. Done right, Applied Mschf could fuel Mschf’s most impactful work yet.
Category:
E-Commerce
Back in March, Facebook introduced a new feature that wasnt exactly new. The Friends tabdescribed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a throwback to OG Facebookis a way for the apps users to see only the latest posts from friends, and none of the algorithm-recommended content otherwise dominating their feeds. Personal social networking, once Facebooks core product, had finally been relegated to a nostalgic lark its users could whimsically opt into. Less than a month later, with its years-in-the-making antitrust trial, the Federal Trade Commission sought to prove Metas early-2010s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp gave it a monopoly on personal social networking sites. Over the course of the trials six weeks, Metas defense emerged: a precise accounting of why Facebooks new Friends feature feels so quaint and retro. As detailed in a just-released post-trial brief, Metas argument is that it cant possibly have a monopoly on personal social networkingbecause personal social networking no longer meaningfully exists. Thats entirely due to the way people now use Facebook and Instagram, with most of them drawn to what Meta calls unconnected content, from accounts users dont even follow. The protracted legal battle began in December 2020, when the FTC filed its lawsuit against Meta in conjunction with 46 states. The agency claimed Meta had scooped up smaller social startups like Instagram to extinguish their threat to its supremacy, and used the reach of its platforms to slow down user growth among competitors. (Less compelling for the FTC, apparently, were the instances in which Meta allegedly just copied features from the companies it didnt acquire.) Unfortunately for the FTC, the lawsuit began taking shape right as TikTok was enjoying the kind of explosive growth that Metas monopoly is meant to have made impossible, and right as that growths seismic impact on the entire social media landscape settled in. The FTCs idea of social media is outdated In its earliest days, Facebook was all about connection, rather than content. People used it to build digital rapport with new friends, get back in touch with old ones, and keep tabs on crushes. Gradually, though, the sites News Feed began absorbing more and more of the greater internet around it, to discourage users from ever leaving. Even before TikToks For You page hit social media like a nonchronological atom bomb, Meta seemed to realize that content relevance was driving engagement more than friendship strength, and began peppering in unconnected posts that algorithmically matched user interest. TikToks ascendance merely accelerated the shift toward unconnected-ness. Log into Facebook in 2025, perhaps to search for a used couch on Marketplace, and what awaits between updates from friends is a heady brew of sponsored posts, straight-up ads, dispatches from various celebrities and politicians, and, yes, a bottomless well of short-form video content. The significance of Metas evolution, though, seems lost on the FTC. The agency has worked itself into contortions to argue that Metas primary offering is still personal social networking, and that Meta isnt competing against TikTok or YouTube. In its opening statement, the FTC narrowly defined the market for its antitrust case, citing Meta competitors as insignificant as BeReal and MeWe, while excluding obvious peers such as X and TikTok, along with YouTube. With this puzzlingly limited definition of the services Facebook and Instagram provide, the FTC claims Metas market share of personal social networking sites amounts to 78% of all monthly active users and 85% of time spent in-app. That assertion holds water, however, only if the mid-aughts version of social media were still a market any of these apps is currently competing to dominate. During the trial, the FTC thoroughly emphasized TikTok and YouTubes disinterest in friend sharing as a means of differentiating them from Metas apps. Adam Presser, who leads operations at TikTok, testified that only around 1% of users time on TikTok is spent on the apps Friends tab. (The company only keeps that feature around, he claimed, in hopes that it might eventually enhance users experience in some way.) The FTC further revealed during the trial the failure of YouTubes mid-2010s experiments with adding social features like private messaging, and that YouTube has since abandoned friend-sharing as a goal. If anything, the FTC may have been too convincing in its portrayal of the short-form video giants indifference toward friend sharing. By doing so, the agency left an opening for Meta to argue why its own apps are now similarly inclined. Peoples habits have shifted away from friend sharing In its posttrial brief, Meta reveals the full extent to which it was rattled by TikToks late-2010s success with both short-form video and AI recommendations, which the company claims slowed user growth for both Facebook and Instagram. Meta consequently made a major strategic shift to respond to competition, the brief states. It invested billions of dollars to develop its own AI-recommendation algorithms to rival TikTok and introduced a new feature (called Reels) to serve the demonstrated consumer demand that was shifting away from friend sharing. The document goes on to mention that a Meta executive, whose name and title are redacted, has been paying creators hundreds of millions of dollars to secure exclusive content for Instagram. For better or worse, to suggest that Meta has not been competing in the arms race for unconnected video content is to deny reality. At the same time, Metas users have demonstrably gravitated to content over connection. The posttrial brief cites a 2023 experiment to determine what most engages Facebook users. Upon increasing friend-original content in users fees by 20%, the company reported that users began spending less time on the app. When Meta took the opposite tact, however, serving more short-form video content instead, users stayed locked in longer. Skip ahead to 2025 and Meta now claims users spend only 7% of their time on Instagram and 17% of their time on Facebook consuming content from online friends. Social media as an industry is now more than 20 years old. At the time Facebook first hit critical mass, adults may have been thrilled with the novelty of being digitally linked to so many friends and acquaintances. Zoomers, on the other hand, have grown up with social media and have been able to choose whether and how to connect online with friends their entire lives. Many now seem to prefer doing so in group chats and messaging apps. If they come to Facebook at all these days, many apparently do so as yet another means of consuming content. According to Metas posttrial brief, The number of new young adult monthly active users with zero friends after 90 days on Facebook has increased from only 8% to 10% in 2012 to nearly 50% today. In retrospect, Meta may have rolled out its OG Facebook-style Friends tab less than a month before the antitrust trial began just to prove how uninterested todays users are in friend sharing. The posttrial brief cites, in its as-yet-unsealed evidence, de minimis usage of the new dedicated Friends Tab as confirmation that the puck is moving elsewhere. Where social media goes from here is yet to be determined So, where is social media heading? There are plenty of hints in where it already ismuch of them having to do with AI. Social apps are currently inundated with all manner of AI slop. A Cornell University study found that during the 2024 election about 12% of images and 1.4% of text posts on X were AI-generated. More recently, TikTok has seen a surge in AI-generated video contentwith a clip of bunnies on trampolines, created by Google Veo 3, garnering more than 230 million views on the app this summer. And beyond the AI that users are posting to these apps, the platforms have been experimenting with AI chatbots as a new form of friend to connect with. So far, the results have been decidedly mixed. Back in March, for instance, a Facebook Messenger chatbot named Big sis Billie reportedly lured a cognitively impaired man to a physical address across state lines. The man tripped and fell along the way, ultimately dying from his injuries. Early on in the antitrust trial, Zuckerberg described his vision of social medias future. Despite the relative failures of the Metaverse and Apple Vision Pro recently, the Meta CEO predicted the rise of increasingly immersive content beyond video, claiming, were just about due for this next major transition to smart glasses that blend the physical and digital world together. It remains to be seen, though, how much consumer demand exists for social media to become more like an augmented reality game. Perhaps the future of social media is group chat apps like Geneva, Internet 1.0-aping social magazines like Perfectly Imperfect, or subscription-based micro-communities on Patreon built around shared interests in a podcast or creator. On a long enough timeline, though, every done-to-death trend becomes ripe for renewal. (See: our reboot-filled box office, or Ubers obsession with reinventing the bus.) It may just be a matter of time before user fatigue from connecting with people across disparate sites and apps leads a Silicon Valley wunderkind to bring everyone together in a massive digital community. Sort of like a social network.
Category:
E-Commerce
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