Konstanze is a member of the Leadership Group and leads Ashoka’s new global initiative on Tech & Humanity. She’s also the head of Ashoka in North America. A social anthropologist and journalist by background, she founded Ashoka in her native Germany in 2003 and co-led Ashoka’s emergence and growth in Western Europe, introducing the then radically new concept of social entrepreneurship to the continent. She also co-founded the Globalizer, an initiative re-defining what we mean by scale. She worked for CNN and FAZ and was a board member for GLS Bank, Germany’s leading ethical financial institution, before moving to the US in 2015. She is on the advisory board of CASE at Duke University.
Link to https://www.ashoka.org/en-ro/story/ai-health-future-human-agency copied.
As part of a Forbes Series about the future of Tech & Humanity, Ashoka Fellow Stephen Friend spoke to Konstanze Frischen about the opportunities and challenges of AI-backed medicine, and who makes decisions about our lives.
"What does it take to ensure that everyone has agency? In the new era, how can we make sure people are in charge of their own health conditions? That is what we are working on in our projects."
"There is a fundamental disconnect between the capitalist structure of the current medical system and the benefit to the individual... The fun is that AI and wearables are poised to enable us to crack open the sacred roles in the field of medicine, and to give agency back to the individual. But because our new model of health care will not incur the same costs, hence not the same profits, there will be less interest from companies at least at the beginning of this fundamental transition in health care. Advocacy and leadership will come from the nonprofit side."
