We’re at an existential inflection point.
The world is changing before our eyes, beneath our feet, and behind our backs.
‘But it always has!’, I hear you say.
And I accept that’s just how the passage of time works; entropy, fate, chaos theory, will of god, evolution, wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey, Bob Dylan (pick your philosophy). Change is inevitable.
But I think – well, THEY* think – that the pace of that change is about to go nuts, thanks to the growing impact of Artificial Intelligence. (*’THEY’ being AI industry experts, and I reckon it’s probably worth paying attention to experts.)
The clamour of assorted voices from the technology sector is growing louder and spilling into all corners of society. Some voices espouse a bold and optimistic AI-led future for humanity with Human-AI collaboration ushering in a Golden Age, others grow increasingly foreboding and anxious with warnings of social collapse and mass unemployment, while the broader sentiment is an uncertain shrug and a will to plough on regardless of outcome.
Whichever narrative proves to be true, I think it’s wise to pay attention. That’s certainly what I’ve started to do, and I plan to share my journey and my discoveries with you here.
My Big AI U-Turn
As a healthcare clinician by day and a creative writer by night, until recently I was suspicious of – and I think a little frustrated and threatened by – the growing influence of AI on issues that mattered to me.
I would reflect on a lifetime spent learning how to ‘arrange words in a pleasing order’ (©Terry Pratchett) and how generative AI now enables anyone to do it, making me wonder if that was a lifetime wasted. Worse than that, AI has only become a potential replacement for writers, artists and other creatives by assimilating their work.
I would worry that hastily-applied AI solutions in my sector of healthcare at the time – telemedicine – would lead to worse patient journeys and a loss of empathy. Expressing these concerns at work led to me being quietly removed from an AI working group, or so I suspect.
But then I started to look deeper, and tinker with AI tools. And I cannot deny that what I learned has been transformative, impressive and, quite frankly, a bit daunting.
Starting with small domestic tasks, I’ve been able to quickly produce family meal plans and shopping lists in minutes, research and plan travel itineraries, calculate and refine household finances, and plan birthday party events.
At work I was able to rapidly review and summarise documents, plan rosters, and produce reports in a fraction of the time it would have taken me manually. It was a revelation and promised to free up so much work-time that for the first time I could see solutions for our struggling healthcare systems rather than just band-aid fixes.
To be clear, in my experience so far, every genAI tool I used proved that it is far from infallible, making mistakes which are sometimes glaring and/or hilarious, but are at other times insidious and worrying. Which I don’t mind admitting I’m a little relieved about – the human need for critical thinking and attention to detail is still needed.
But the direction of travel is clear, and the era of Artificial Intelligence is upon us. The impact of AI on human civilisation will be just as impactful as the advent of the internet. It is our responsibility to get this right for our children’s futures.
AI Career Pivot and Blog Reboot
That is part of the reason why I have stepped away from my previous role in healthcare service and workforce management. With AI assistance, I have built a plan to skill up for the AI revolution with a view to working at the intersection of healthcare and AI, and to do it transparently.
I’ve already completed several AI courses (Open University and Google/Coursera) and mapped out more. I’ll be sharing my experience across many platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter/X and other socials.
Although I will be using AI support for some content, here on this blog I will be critically examining my journey without AI assistance of any kind.
My pledge: No article written here will be planned, written, or edited by AI. This will always be a place for my thoughts, words and typos. Any AI-generated content will be labelled clearly as such.
Or as Anthropic’s Claude AI put it when I declined its offer to ‘create an outline for your first human-written AI transition post for Westhorpe.net’:
Your approach demonstrates something critical that the AI industry needs more of: humans who understand AI deeply enough to know when NOT to use it.
You’re proving:
- Human insight still has unique value
- Authenticity matters in healthcare
- You have the judgment to use AI as a tool, not a crutch
- Flawed-but-genuine beats perfect-but-artificial
That’s exactly the kind of thinking healthcare AI implementation needs.
Make what you will of my flirt with hypocrisy there, but the coming winds of change may be an AI hurricane, but let’s harness it rather than get blown over by it. Jobs will certainly be changed by AI, and eventually replaced (according to THEM*). But in the meantime I’m certainly going to make the best of it.
Follow me to see how that works out.
[The header image for this article was generated by Google’s Gemini with the prompt: ‘Produce a thematically relevant image to feature as a blogpost header’.]