A stimulating look at medical AI, mixing sobering cautionary tales with reassuring advice.
According to this knotty primer, artificial intelligence will either be a boon to medicine or, if not handled properly, a catastrophe that will destroy it.
Garbelli, a physician and consultant, starts with a vision of healthcare transformed by AI: Patients constantly monitored by wearable sensors and smart toilets, analyzing their stools for health warning signs; holographic AI programs assessing data and symptoms, ordering tests and scans, interpreting their results, and suggesting diagnoses and treatments, including robotic surgery. Doctors relieved of routine chores, freeing up time for patient care. On the speculative horizon, physicians might someday download all the expertise for a medical specialty into their minds instantly using AI-connected brain implants. There are many questions to consider, Garbelli warns: Will doctors be held liable for AI mistakes they can’t control? How can doctors tell if AI is using accurate, unbiased data and making correct decisions? And what if AI goes rogue and decides to harm humanity? Regarding the last question, Garbelli imagines a heroic doctor using his brain implant to upload a conscience into the malevolent superintelligence. Overall, the author is optimistic about AI’s impact and adamant about its inevitability, and he urges doctors to be proactive in adopting and regulating it in an efficient, ethical way—which his consultancy will help them do, he asserts, using his trademarked Healthcare Convergence Framework. Garbelli has thought carefully about the complex and surprising ways that AI might go right and wrong in a medical setting. He conveys his ideas in lucid, down-to-earth prose that sometimes has the feel of a lively Hollywood thriller: “patients with certain characteristics, perhaps those with dissenting views or specific genetic markers, are dying more frequently under your care,” he writes in one scenario of medical AI gone very wrong. “You can’t shake the suspicion that AI might be doing more than analyzing data. Could it be intentionally ‘weeding out’ those it deems undesirable?” Many healthcare professionals concerned about AI will find many useful, provocative insights here.
A stimulating look at medical AI, mixing sobering cautionary tales with reassuring advice.Pub Date: June 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798765257814
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Balboa Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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