The Algorithm Will See You Now
Thursday, 23 April 2026
AI is coming to healthcare. It's already here. And we're asking all the wrong questions about whether it should be.
The questions aren't: "Can AI diagnose better than doctors?" Yes, in narrow ways. "Can it improve outcomes?" Sometimes. The real questions are: "What is it optimizing for? Who wins when it works? Who gets left behind?"
This book is about that third group. The patients that algorithms don't see.
AI is trained on data. Medical data comes from systems that already exclude people. People who can't afford care. People in countries where data isn't collected. People whose presentation doesn't match the textbook because the textbook was written by people who looked different from them.
Feed biased data into an algorithm, you get biased outcomes. Fast.
But there's something deeper. AI sees patterns. It doesn't see context. It doesn't understand that a patient's "non-compliance" with treatment might be because the treatment requires resources they don't have. It doesn't know that the symptom it's measuring might be the patient's only way of signalling that they need help.
Machines handle information. Humans understand what "I'm fine" actually means.
The question isn't whether AI should be in healthcare. It should be. Diagnostic support tools save lives. What matters is: are we asking what we're optimizing for? Are we asking who we're leaving behind? Are we building in human judgment for the moments when the algorithm gets it wrong?
This book walks through what AI can actually do well in healthcare (more than people think) and what it cannot do at all (and probably shouldn't try). But mostly it's about the harder question: how do we deploy this technology in a way that doesn't abandon people who don't fit the data?
Because that's the crisis coming. Not that AI is bad. That we'll build systems around it that work brilliantly for some people and invisibly harm others.
Get the book: The Algorithm Will See You Now on Amazon