Is the U.S. ready for another moonshot?

Kevin Scott, CTO at Microsoft, is, but he’s not talking about taking to space any time soon.  Rather, in a recent interview with the Seattle Times, Scott argues that AI is poised to take the country’s healthcare system to a whole new level in a way similar to how the Apollo space program changed our relationship with outer space.

“Instead of a ‘moon shot,’ our moon shot should be something like radically transforming health care for the public good,” Scott said in talking up his new book, titled Reprogramming The American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley — Making AI Serve Us All. “We all know the cost of delivering ubiquitous, high-quality health care is very high and growing faster than (gross domestic product). So, if you want to change that calculus, you are going to have to have some sort of technology intervene that will help change the shape of the curve. I think AI, if we make a deliberate set of investments, can make than happen.”

Like an increasing number of healthcare stakeholders, Scott believes the current coronavirus pandemic heightens the need for a dramatic reshaping of our healthcare system around new technology.

“I think our reaction to this horrible pandemic we’re having now could produce a wave of investment and innovation in biotechnology that defines the next 75 years,” he said. “The way that the industrialization of the modern world post-World War II has defined the past 75 years.”

On the pandemic, he added: “If you imagine the safety net that people need right now, given the economic disruption, having that ubiquitous, cheap, high-quality healthcare would make an enormous difference in people’s lives.”

According to the article, “Scott and Microsoft have spent recent weeks working with Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies on using AI to map the body’s immune system and how it reacts to individual diseases. Adaptive hopes to soon get a test for COVID-19 — the illness caused by the novel coronavirus — into clinical trials, and having a detailed map of the body’s unique reactions to it would hasten that process.”

But beyond the immediate crisis, Scott points to what such mapping and early detection can mean for individuals.

“There are a whole range of machine learning systems that are getting better and better all the time at diagnostics,” he said. “And so, one of the challenges with providing good healthcare is detecting when someone is sick as early as humanly possible. So, the earlier you know that someone is sick … the higher the probability that they’re going to make a better recovery and get back to good health and productivity quickly.”

According to the article, in his book Scott recognizes that AI can be either used or abused, and he concludes by saying that’s why broader-based conversations must start with clarifying expectations for the technology and then turn to determining how best to implement it.