“There’s a narrative that’s being pushed, not only by the people providing the solutions, but the evangelists, saying, ‘Everything changes today. Everything’s disrupted.’ It’s not quite that simple.”

By 2050, Nikolas Badminton, a futurist speaker, author, executive advisor, and chief futurist at Futurist.com, envisions a world transformed by exponential technologies. But for Badminton, building that world isn’t simply about what fields like spatial computing, generative AI, and sensor fusion can do. The key is exploring what the union of humans and machines can do. 

“We’re at this point where we can start to work out what the healthcare practitioner‒plus-machine looks like as an augmented capability,” Badminton says. 

Bringing AI into the lab and the clinic, for example, where it can do everything from drug discovery and predictive toxicology to virtual screening and recording patient visits, actually means prioritizing the human element. 

“It’s an upskilling and upgrading of our capability to provide more focused attention on the patient,” Badminton feels. It frees us up to “start to think about how the journey of the healthcare practitioner and the relationship of the individual is optimized over time.”

Another area where Badminton sees the human-machine partnership thriving is augmented reality. 

“People are really betting the farm on this technology,” he says. Devices like Apple’s Vision Pro headset are “assisting surgeons to make really accurate decisions and to be connected to the corpus of knowledge around the world.” He believes that augmented and virtual reality will soon play a greater role in medical education and training. 

But while these devices and wearables will become “commonplace,” Badminton says all new technologies must overcome fear and distrust, and one way to do that is to always “put the human at the center of the solution,” he says, “both from the patient and the healthcare-practitioner perspective. Then we end up with something that’s incredibly powerful.”

Watch Badminton’s exclusive interview with Medscape to learn more about his vision of medicine in 2050.