May 20, 2026

Health — both in and outside of the healthcare industry, and at the personal and collective levels — is facing an uncertain future. Healthcare workers in the United States are experiencing high rates of burnout, and the public is struggling with the increasing costs of care, with no end in sight. At the same time, health tech companies are benefiting from unprecedented levels of investment as they pursue AI-powered products that they promise will revolutionize healthcare. Meanwhile, unregulated chatbots are gobbling up people’s personal data as they turn to them for emotional support, the growth of data centers is producing harmful air and water pollutants, and LLM-generated health information is spreading falsehoods and excluding marginalized people. All of these changes impact health, too.

In an attempt to address these intensifying health crises, the healthcare industry has embraced two approaches: The first is person-centered care, the idea that clinical decisions should be made in collaboration with, rather than on behalf of, patients. The second is data-driven care, the use of data analytics and information technology to inform clinical and organizational decision-making. While the healthcare industry sells these two approaches as aligned, their dissonance highlights a deeper debate about who — or what — should be the arbiter of choice: When it comes to health, should we place our trust in people or technology? Overprescribing agency, autonomy, and decision-making power to the influx of AI “solutions” in health is further intensifying this debate and introducing a new set of considerations about data privacy, accountability, and algorithmic bias. In all of this, the public is left to weigh the consequences of who and what they value.

With billions of dollars invested in ensuring that unrestrained AI is the sole solution, the power struggle over who gets to dictate the trajectory of health has reached an undeniable inflection point. To transform health systems for the better, we must craft a new vision for how AI should impact health — one that includes the aspirations of those whom emerging technologies render most vulnerable. 

In my role as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s futurist-in-residence, I’m surveying the landscape of possible futures in health and technology in search of new ideas about how to address today’s crises of health and care. As an Afrofuturist, I blend imagination and strategy to anticipate trends about the future of health equity that can inform decision-making in the present. I draw from marginalized futurisms — Black, queer, Indigenous, disabled, and global ways of imagining the future — to think about current impacts and possible alternatives for incorporating AI into health systems now and for years to come.  

To expand our collective capacity for enacting equitable futures, I’m engaging futurist methodologies that deepen our understanding of how technology and automation are implicated in health inequalities. What kinds of forgotten or unknown problem-solving techniques can marginalized futurisms give us access to? In the face of rising attacks on knowledge infrastructures, how can we generate, protect, and nurture a sustainable ecosystem for these diverse ways of knowing to thrive across science, technology, and public health? Remaining in contact with a multitude of futurisms in pursuit of answers to these questions can help us remember that no future, even those confidently promoted by powerful people and institutions, is certain. 

Futures for Some, Health for None

The loudest proponents of AI’s potential to revolutionize healthcare predict a future that is productivity-centered, highly personalized, and ultimately post-human. In capitalizing on a beleaguered industry — known for over-stretched workers, faltering trust, and complex financialization — investors are funding technological “solutions” that position health as hackable. At their most apocalyptic, these visions for a digital health future devolve into dystopian fantasies. Tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk have all professed their interest in constructing futures that disregard humanity in favor of omniscient artificial intelligence. Their brand of futurism imagines a world in which marginalized people bear the brunt of the consequences for innovation that benefits the wealthy, and where eugenics undergird human society. We can see this in ads for the health startup Nucleus Genetics, for example, which uses a repackaged version of old-fashioned racism to encourage customers to “pick your baby.” 

This future can also be seen in the federal government’s broad dismantling of public health. Editors at The Lancet characterized Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first year as head of the Department of Health and Human Services as a “failure by most measures,” marked by dangerous junk science, shuttered research programs, and revoked access to health data. While the federal government tips the regulatory scales in favor of corporate interests, its hostility to public health has had a global reach: it is estimated that the withdrawal of funding for USAID and other international aid programs has caused hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths and will lead to the deaths of 22 million more people, largely in Africa, over the next four years. Together with the tech billionaires, the Trump administration’s health futurism is a zero-sum game where a few people with power monopolize quality care and benefit from innovation while the majority suffers. 

Indeed, the allure of care that is infinitely customizable and controllable obscures a fundamental truth: health, while measurable and experienced at an individual level, is a collective commitment shaped not only by powerful institutions, but by intertwined networks of shared action. Resisting a future that is being promoted by people with unprecedented amounts of money and power is a daunting task. But when we remember that sickness knows no borders, that genetics aren’t deterministic, that health is collective, and that health inequalities persist even in the absence of data, these techno-solutionist and post-human futurisms lose their legitimacy. 

Healthy Futures on the Horizon

During a recent RWJF event, Dr. Julie Mossbridge asked me to imagine a future in which the decades-long efforts of reproductive justice activists succeeded and there was no longer a Black maternal health crisis. What came to mind was not a concrete slate of tangible transformations, but an idea of what a healthy future might feel like: liberatory, loving, and free. While the stakes of the battle over who gets to define the future of digital health are as massive as the fate of humanity, some of the solutions may be as simple as storytelling, foresight, imagination, and play, each deliberately designed to show that other futures are possible.

In addition to the immense labor, advancements, and commitments within the healthcare industry, health is made up of a multitude of worlds beyond it. The mosaic of resources, relationships, and experiences that people cultivate before they ever enter a doctor’s office shape how we each access health and wellbeing. Given its interconnectedness with everyday life, health has long been a centerpiece of movements towards justice: from the Black Panther Party’s free lunch program, to AIDS activists’ community health initiatives, to the Fight for Fifteen and other labor movements that sought dignity and better pay for workers, health is and has always been a shared mission. These movements all strived not only to improve conditions for people in the present, but to wrestle back the power to shape what the future of health and care could look like. They organized around the hope for health and wellbeing as a universal right, even when it seemed neither possible nor probable. 

If we are to usher in an equitable future in which innovation does not come at the cost of care, we must expand our definition of who gets to narrate, predict, and guide the trajectory of health and technology. Following in that forward-looking tradition, this series presents a range of possibilities for the future of digital health, considering the different ways that care and AI are intertwined. Mira Vale shines a light on the experts who are working on building a moral infrastructure to inform the study and regulation of mental health AI. With Muslim women at the center of her argument, Hawra Rabaan considers the ways that AI datasets about women’s health flatten non-dominant experiences of domestic abuse. Engaging the stakes of opting out of AI, Odia Kane explores the implications of a future in which consenting to the use of our data is no longer an option. Finally, Linda Huber offers a vision of what mutual aid and health informatics have to offer one another: collective governance of healthcare at a grassroots level. Together, these essays stand as proof that the future of digital health is ours to shape, and offer inspiration for building it. 

This essay series was curated by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Futurist-in-Residence Joan Mukogosi as part of a grant to Data & Society. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.