AI Makes Tasks Cheaper. It Does Not Make Care Cheaper.
Benedict Evans’ 2026 AI Eats the World keynote offers a useful lens for health and care work.
AI may help with tasks: summarizing records, drafting notes, searching guidance, preparing referrals, or simplifying complex language.
But health and care work is not just a list of tasks. It also includes judgment, trust, escalation, accountability, consent, and knowing when a person needs human support.
So the public-service question is not:
Can AI do this task?
It is:
Can the service safely verify the output, protect the person affected, and keep human accountability intact?
AI may make some tasks cheaper. It does not make care cheap. It does not make responsibility cheap. It does not make verification cheap.
One Insight
AI separates tasks from jobs, but public services cannot separate automation from duty of care.
Source: Benedict Evans, AI Eats the World, 2026 keynote.
Drafted with GPT assistance. Final framing and PSA interpretation focus on public-service accountability, healthcare AI governance, and the distinction between task automation and duty of care.
Perhaps another word than “cheap” might be useful in discussing healthcare costs and initiatives. Cheap used here is kind of a straw dog, as no one would say they want to advocate for “cheap” care when they are advocating for reduced costs for healthcare.
PSA is not advocating “cheap care”, but we are strongly advocating reducing costs of healthcare in all aspects of the current US healthcare system…. using whatever innovations can be enabled and diffused that support appropriate values.
AI is one pillar of cost reductions, but also of improved access to quality care.. As are better healthcare structures and better payment and insurance MO…as well as enabling the involvement of community and family resources for care.
Much more opportunity for quality but affordable healthcare is potentially there….as the PSA IHPF project seeks to discover.
Also, it’s much too early to know how AI will be used to support and advance healthcare values and outcomes in the coming years.
One area that seems obvious is that diagnostic tools that enable at home monitoring and warnings will advance the quality of preventive care, and post healing care. And these will only get better and less costly as they reach a mass market in the future.
As we choose to enable quality human care giving… having an AI to help the caregiver and the patient understand the many variables in specific care…. for specific health needs….. will be an essential tool.
AFAIK, there’s no current need to assume that AI will “cheapen care” and a great need to keep an open mind to where this powerful innovative tool can produce positive, and sometimes as yet unimagined, improvements to US healthcare.