From a December 2025 conversation between AlignIQ co-founders Dan Garmat and Caroline Stauss, responding to Vox’s Explain It to Me episode “Paging Dr. Chatbot.”
Dan reflects on the shift from the information age to the imagination age, using healthcare as the example. A reflection on purpose, not medical advice.
Key takeaways
- In the information age, the limit was how fast we could process information. “Process things more quickly” isn’t an imaginative goal.
- When machines handle information processing, human imagination becomes more important.
- That opens the question of purpose: what is the meeting between a doctor and a patient for, and can we achieve it better?
- The business function can go to AI, leaving room to return to the human side of care.
Try this with your team
Pick one recurring meeting or service your organization runs. If AI handled all the information processing around it, what would the time together be for?
Going further
Thinking about where AI fits your own mission? Start with the free AI Opportunity & Risk Snapshot.
Sources mentioned
- Vox, Explain It to Me: “Paging Dr. Chatbot” (podcast episode)
More from this series
Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
Part of what I see here is the difference between the information age and the imagination age. In the information age, your limit is basically the processing of information. And so the idea of “we need to process things more quickly” is not very imaginative, essentially.
But what opens up when you have robotic information processing is that the human part, imagination, is now more important. The idea of thinking beyond current limitations and asking: what is the purpose of this meeting of the doctor and the patient?
And can we actually achieve that purpose? I think there’s going to be more space for that than there has been in the past, where everything was just, well, the purpose is the business function.
I think there’s going to be space to let all the business function go to the AI, and then come back to the human aspect.