The AI That’s Quietly Rewriting Medicine

A routine doctor’s visit left me with more questions than answers. Why are they recording our conversations now, and what does it mean for the future of medicine? In this issue, we break it all down. We also explore why the future is arriving faster than most people realize, and share the AI tools and learning resources you need to understand Agentic AI and ambient Scribe technology. Stay curious.

• The Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think
• 🧰 AI Tools — Medical Scribe Tools
• The AI That’s Quietly Rewriting Medicine
• 📚Learning Corner — The Principal-Agent Problem in AI. Who Is the Model Actually Working For?

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The Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think

A Summary of ARK Invest’s Big Ideas 2026

ARK Invest just released its 10th annual Big Ideas report, consisting of 100+ pages of research on the technologies reshaping the global economy.

Five major technology platforms, AI, Robotics, Blockchain, Energy Storage, and Biotech, are feeding each other, and the pace of change is accelerating. ARK’s bold claim is that global GDP growth could hit 7.3% by 2030, more than double the IMF’s forecast, and the direction is hard to argue with.

Their 13 Big Ideas.

🤖 AI Infrastructure — The cost of AI dropped 99% in a single year. Data center investment is growing at 29% annually and could hit $1.4 trillion by 2030. Is it a bubble? Even though tech valuations are nowhere near dot-com levels?

🛒 AI Consumer OS — AI agents are becoming how we shop, search, and discover. Purchase time has collapsed from an hour to 90 seconds. By 2030, AI could facilitate over $8 trillion in online spending. Is Google’s search dominance in the crosshairs? Or would they just adjust and keep the crown?

⚡ AI Productivity — AI tools save the average knowledge worker ~50 minutes per day and pay for themselves in half a workday. Coding costs fell 91% in 8 months. AI-native startups are hitting $100M+ in revenue within 2 years of founding.

₿ Bitcoin — Institutions are in. ETFs, pension funds, and corporate treasuries now hold 12% of all Bitcoin. The US even created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. They claim that Bitcoin will reach a $16 trillion market cap by 2030.

🔗 Tokenized Assets — Stablecoin transaction volume hit $3.5 trillion in a single month, larger than Visa, PayPal, and global remittances combined. Banks, fintechs, and governments are all launching their own digital currencies.

🧬 Multiomics & Biotech — A blood test that detects dozens of cancers simultaneously is coming. AI-powered drug discovery is collapsing development timelines from decades to years. Rare diseases that were previously untreatable are becoming curable.

🚀 Reusable Rockets — As AI demands more compute than Earth can comfortably provide, space-based data centers could become a real possibility. AI growth could increase rocket launch demand by 60x.

🦾 Robotics — Humanoid robots are entering factories now, and the plan is home adoption. ARK calculates that a single household robot could add $62,000 in annual economic value per home. If widely adopted, US GDP growth could jump from 2–3% to 5–6%.

⚡ Distributed Energy — Solar and batteries are cheap enough to make energy independence real for homeowners and communities. This also powers the AI data center buildout without blowing up the grid.

🚗 Autonomous Vehicles — Robotaxis are commercially operating today in several US cities. The cost per mile is falling toward levels that make personal car ownership optional. Your commute time could become work time.

📦 Autonomous Logistics — Warehouses and delivery networks are rapidly automating. Same-day delivery may soon be the default, not a premium.

What does it all mean?

• Use AI tools daily. The productivity gap between those who do and those who don’t is widening fast.
• Check your career’s automation exposure — and redirect energy toward judgment, creativity, and relationships.
• Get proactive about your health. Precision medicine is advancing quickly enough that early action on preventive care and genetic testing will compound in value.
• Make sure you have some exposure to these themes — whether through ETFs, clean energy, tech, or a small Bitcoin allocation.
• Think long-term. The direction of these trends is compelling. The timing is always messier than forecasts suggest.

📰 AI News and Trends

• Can OpenAI be valued at $1Trillion? The company is reportedly planning for it with a $600 billion total compute spending by 2030, as it prepares for a potential IPO.
• Anthropic doesn’t want its AI used in autonomous weapons or government surveillance. Those carve-outs could cost it a major military contract.
• According to a Google VP, warns that two types of AI startups may not survive.
• Sam Altman says Elon Musk’s idea of putting data centers in space is ‘ridiculous.’

Other Tech News

• It’s called the ‘Fitbit for Farts,’ but does it solve a problem or another scam?
• By adding something like -AI at the end of the search query, the AI Overview will be stripped from the results page. The modifier is breaking Google’s algorithm to surface the AI overlay. Try it.
• Nvidia reports Q4 earnings on Wednesday; the company is ~8% of the S&P 500, and its results are essentially a report card for the whole AI industry. Salesforce, Snowflake, Dell, and CoreWeave all report this week too, every one of them deep in the AI bet. Are companies actually making real money from AI? We shall see this week.
• Bitcoin fell below $65,000 amid renewed global trade tensions.

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📚Learning Corner

The Principal-Agent Problem in AI. Who Is the Model Actually Working For? When your doctor’s AI takes notes, is it optimizing for the doctor, the patient, or the hospital’s billing department? This is one of the most important and under-discussed tensions in applied AI right now. The answers may be here:

• Rethinking AI Agents: A Principal-Agent Perspective
• AI alignment principal agent models

The AI That’s Quietly Rewriting Medicine

Today I had a routine visit to the doctor to check on some lower abdominal pain that I had been experiencing a few weeks ago. Luckily, it has subsided. While at the doctor’s office, he surprisingly, and for the very first time, asked if I was okay with our conversation being recorded. He raised a mobile device, implying that it would be recorded on it. I said, “Sure, why not?” I tried to peek at his screen to see what app he was using, but couldn’t quite make it out. Our exchange went well, and I’m glad to say I’m in reasonably good health. At the end of the visit, I finally let my curiosity get the better of me and asked what they were using to record the conversation. Not surprisingly, he said, “It’s an AI app called Ambient. He added, “It makes our jobs so much easier and faster.”

I left the doctor’s office wondering, who, or what, will apps like this be replacing soon? I came home determined to research and learn more. Athelas is a San Francisco health tech company whose AI-powered “Scribe” tool listens to doctor-patient conversations and automatically generates clinical notes, turning what used to be 15–20 minutes of post-visit typing into a 30-second review. It tackles one of medicine’s biggest problems, which is that doctors spend twice as much time on paperwork as they do with actual patients. The market is crowded, with Microsoft, Google, and several well-funded startups all competing in the same space, but Athelas stands out by combining note-taking with billing and coding automation.

The roles most at risk are medical scribes, transcriptionists, coders, and prior authorization specialists, essentially every support job that exists to manage documentation. One of the benefits is that this tech may actually restore something medicine has been losing for years, which is a doctor who is fully present in the room with you.

🧰 AI Tools of The Day

Medical Scribe Tools

• Nuance DAX (Microsoft) — Microsoft acquired Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion in 2022, largely because of DAX (Dragon Ambient eXperience). It integrates deeply with Epic, the dominant EHR system used by most large hospital systems. This is Athelas’s biggest competitor at the enterprise level.
• Suki AI — a voice assistant specifically built for clinicians, backed by Google. Strong focus on specialty medicine.
• Nabla Copilot — a European player gaining ground in the U.S., known for a clean interface and strong multilingual support.
• Abridge — One of the largest health systems in the country. They’ve received strong clinical validation.
• DeepScribe — focused on specialty care, particularly for complex conversations in fields like oncology and psychiatry.
• Freed AI — newer entrant but growing quickly among independent and private practice physicians because of its simplicity and pricing.

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🩺The AI That’s Quietly Rewriting Medicine was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.