Healthy Spaces

 Philanthropy is “the brotherly love of humans”.  Asian societies strongly believe in bottom-up family-centered philanthropy.  If each family practiced effective micro-philanthropy, then each layer of society from neighborhood, district, state and nation would have a strong foundation of well-adjusted, well-loved anchored human beings.    There is no scenario of a better world that does not include more love of others as the foundation of personal kindness.  However, there is more to building a moral society than just having a pipeline of moral individuals emerging from the cocoon of the family.  Technologies disrupt the rules of inclusion and exclusion outside of families. Large shifts in the class of haves and have-nots defy the blessings of a good upbringing.   Big philanthropy conspires to moderate the social adaptation to technological change. Philanthropists cannot do everything for everyone. Big philanthropy dreams of small tweaks to...

The clinic of the future will be a self-driving car that comes to your house with a click.   Strap in.   The monitor greets you with today’ EKG reading, temperature, oxygen level. BP, weight, and a reading of your mood based on a facial scan and analysis of the last 24 hours of your keystrokes in your digital world.   An avatar--personally designed for you—pops up on the screen with a gender, hairstyle, and voice tuned to soothe and build trust.   You named yours Dr. Y.   Y speaks, “You ate too much last night and your toilet tells me that your stomachache is most likely because of a new enterovirus that is flowering in the sewage a few streets east of here….Oh and by the way, you really should try to lose ten pounds….and call your mother.”   A drone lands on your balcony 5 minutes later with Alta Seltzer and two plops and a fizz later you can start your healing journey. The dystopian mobile clinic of the future resembles many medical practices of...