As a Futurist advisor to over 400 of the world's largest companies including many health care / pharma giants, as well as leading AI companies such as Google and Microsoft, Patrick Dixon is one of the world's leading authorities on the impact of AI on future health care.  Dr Dixon is also a physician, who originally specialised in oncology / care of the dying.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) will drive astonishing improvements in health care, saving tens of millions of lives over the next few decades alone.

Over EU30bn is already being spent globally on AI innovations in health care each year, growing 30% pa.

95% of health care companies are now using AI, spending 10% of their collective turnover on AI.

AI has the potential to reduce health costs by up to 10% per episode of care over the next two decades, saving $300bn in the US alone.

Patrick Dixon's 18th book is on Artificial Intelligence. Impact of AI on every industry, government, company and individual. Published by Profile Books in September 2024.

AI will create gigantic benefits for humankind in every industry, saving time and reducing costs. AI will also save hundreds of millions of lives in better health care. At the same time AI will disrupt a billion jobs, kill many in wars, is already out of control, and one day could gain the power to wipe us all out. So what will all this mean for your own career, family, community and wider world? What steps can we take now to survive and succeed in a super-smart world? 

* Patrick Dixon is often described as Europe’s leading Futurist. Author of 18 books, he has advised over 400 of the world’s largest corporations on a wide range of global trends. His clients include Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn and many of the world’s largest manufacturers as well as governments. Patrick is a cancer physician by first training and his first start-up company some decades years ago was an AI-simulator, using computers to talk to and diagnose patients. His website globalchange.com has had 15 million unique visitors with 9 million video views.

20 March 2024 comment on post below: We are now only one step from NATO formally declaring war against Russia.  That step would be a military action by Russia against a NATO member.  But how likely is this?

Our world is facing the greatest geopolitical risks we have seen for over 40 years, with an ongoing war in Eastern Europe, conflict in the Middle East and major tensions over the future of Taiwan.

The Second World War showed us how a war in one region can make other conflicts more likely, because different nations start seeing opportunities of their own in the midst of regional and global chaos.

History shows that the ability of dictators to start new wars is directly related to the political power they have. And President Putin's power base in Russia is now stronger than before the invasion of Ukraine, while his ambition continues to grow to expand the territory that Russia controls.

The more powerful a dictator becomes, by definition, the quieter the voices of dissent around them, the more feeble the challenges to any unrealistic ambitions. Powerful dictators risk loosing their grip on practical realities (eg actual military strength) because those around them are often too afraid to tell them the truth. P

Europe / NATO is therefore at great risk of a further miscalculation / gamble by President Putin, emboldened by a distorted view of the wider world, by lack of internal threats to his power, by mobilisation of his nation to a wartime economy, and by what he believes is fading support for Ukraine in the US.  

Set against this is the fact that Russian military strength has been weakened in the last two years.

 In comparison, NATO / Western Europe can hardly find enough ammunition to supply half of Ukraine's front-line needs, has been very slow to ramp up defence spending, has a poorly defined nuclear weapons strategy, and is in no fit state to go to war against Russia. 

A single new military action by President Putin could be enough to trigger war with NATO, with potential for vast destruction across Western, Eastern and Central Europe - even assuming that no nuclear weapons are fired.  

The most effective way to reduce this risk is for Europe / NATO to rapidly mobilise for outright war, as a preventative measure, but this is currently happening at a very slow pace.  

Manufacturing of new weaponry is painfully slow, and EU nations have hardly woken up to the wartime realities which will mean diverting major spending from other important areas such as health care, and increasing government debt.

Expect EU / NATO to accelerate military spending, with many nations budgeting 2% of GDP, some like Poland far more, by 2027, partly because of pressures from the US to honour NATO-related pledges.

Expect many corporations to continue to shorten supply chains to minimise risk, sourcing within regions rather than across the world.

11 July 2022 note on post below:  History shows that small conflicts often trigger wider ones which is what is happening.  Hundreds of companies cancelled Russian business contracts or exited operations altogether from Russia within days and weeks of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but wider factors remain far more important from the global point of view.

On the one hand, the Russian economy was in any case smaller than Spain before the invasion, and will continue to shrink rapidly during the rest of 2022 and into 2023.  Yet on the other hand, it has a huge old-fashioned military able to create First World War type regional destruction on a massive scale - without using nuclear devices.  Sadly it can cost a mere $100,000 to blow up a 1000 year old building, but $500m to rebuild and restore (and nothing can replace the original history).

So Russia is not an economic superpower able to sustain a massive war for a long period without financial catastrophe.  Nor does Russia have the economic, military or organisational power to subdue and control 40 million angry and bitter Ukrainians....

In December 2018, I gave a keynote via Webinar for Enel Power. They say it was watched live by over 800,000 on several platforms, and by June 2019, it had over 1.4m views on just one platform alone, by March 2024, that had risen to 1.8m. The core messages are even more urgent and relevant today. My physical audience in the room was 25 global influencers from every part of the world, all with popular blogs / followings on green tech and alternative energy. A massive global social media campaign took place in the run up to the Webinar.  Here are the key messages....

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including impact of AI on the energy industry, sustainability, green tech innovation and reducing global CO2 emissions.