On healthcare progress and social unification
Purpose of the essay:
The reason for drawing specific attention to social unification in this Dot-theory web-essay, is that social unification is a known and important byproduct of increased human organisation and rationalisation. This is usually evaluated after the fact, but any theory on reality that produces increased rationalisation like Dot theory does, is, if correct, likely to impact social unification by its influence. Evaluating this potential effect preemptively, appears as fertile ground for the efficient development and distribution of human welfare applications. This essay evaluates and proposes a framework for this fertile ground while focusing on systemic healthcare innovation inequality.
As a theory on reality, Dot Theory produces many benefits but, and for the purposes of this essay, it also invites change on all scales. One of those scales is Social Unity, and the starting position of this essay is that, Dot Theory will have an impact on social unity. This is the known impact of theories on reality, and like its predecessors, it will form a social unity of a different kind. Awaiting confirmation of the theory’s accuracy, one can in the meanwhile tangentially consider that creating or being associated with change of any type comes with personal and social responsibility. This essay aims to touch on both this responsibility and invite early consideration of Dot Theory’s impact from other perspectives.
Key words: Information theory, mimetics, innovation, healthcare
Introduction:
The considered debate on the social impact of innovation and progress in healthcare is laden with multiple group and individual social-value streams and made opaque by the contextualised way we each evaluate its impact on social unity. Ranging from health-inequality to frontier medicine, these streams come with their unique ethical and cultural contexts, pressures and risks. The questions as to what “social unification” really means then, and how it is held in the current cultural context, are placed centrally in this essay. For clarity: this essay doesn’t aim to provide solutions, but merely debate the point. As a start, I could state that innovation, however it comes to be, and whichever its cost distribution, inevitably creates social distinction, if only in access. It then naturally follows that it is not innovation itself that causes inequality but that inequality is an inevitable, even if temporary, consequence of how societies structure innovation, distribution, and policy. It is symptomatic of the user, so to speak. With the time to consider the impact of rationalisation on social unification, I believe debates like this can help us to guide equitable healthcare design, then optimise manufacture and distribution for efficiency.
Innovation, progress and social unity
As entirely rejecting innovation is ultimately absurd, the constructive discussion focuses on the regulation of public access to healthcare innovation in a bid to minimise obstacles to social permeation. As such, we can open by recognising that during this pre-unification phase, those with access to innovation have access to something new. Something they may benefit from testing, yet only have conditional need for. In this process both wins and losses are accrued by both those with, and without access. In healthcare this is suffering. This will however, inevitably and temporarily, create a perspective-bound sense of inequality. If accepted as logically inevitable to the process of unification, this pre-integration phase can be recognised as a process that results in the cost- and reliability-structure changes required for integration. This process can be more or less efficient and its relative efficiency is contextual and can be calculated.
This inevitable phase of temporary inequality should then perhaps better be modelled into a method to anticipate and positively improve the baseline by minimising waste. In this context, the idea of unification can be thought of as the moment where permeation of access to successful strategies is no longer a distinguishable feature. This unity we’d be systematically pursuing then is most accurately defined as the absence of notable differences. This then raises the important issue of the observer, their measurement tools and their willingness to observe and report these differences of course.
What are progress and innovation?
There appears to be a clear distinction between innovation and progress, in that one is legally attributable while the other is the product of collaboration. What they both share however is the novelty element of having done something and achieved a, relatively speaking, better outcome in some respect. Even if having changed something not systemically repeatable, like time, partners or events. What “better” means in this context again becomes a matter of perspective and is beyond the scope of this essay but suffice to say that progress and innovation, in this essay are used interchangeably. This because whether it is one or the other is defined only by notions of legal ownership and benefit rights associated to the work done. It is what makes those rights fair that distinguishes one from the other, not their effect, nature or construct in any other way. In this sense, one could speak of innovation when it is capitalisable for profit, and progress when it just happens.
What does “social” mean?
The definitions of identity, both private, social and professional continuously evolve under each other’s socially sanctioned influence. In the context of this essay, "social" refers to the dynamic, relational fabric of human interactions, identities, and structures that emerge from collective meaning-making. These are often shaped by imitation, power dynamics, and shared narratives, echoing theories that state that desires and behaviours are not innate but copied from models, leading to rivalry or cohesion. Social, then, is not a static category but a process a dynamic interplay of individuals within systems where sentiments assign value to data/experiences, creating hierarchies or equalities.
For healthcare progress, "social" highlights how innovation intersects with these relations: e.g., frontier medicine might unify elites through shared access but fragment broader society if distribution favors the privileged. If Dot Theory is correct, it reframes "social" as computable—observer sentiments as "dots" that, when bias-corrected, reveal inefficiencies in social structures. This could preempt inequality by modeling how health advancements permeate cultures, turning "social" from a vague descriptor into a predictive variable for unification.
What Does "Unification" Mean?
"Unification" in this essay implies the convergence of disparate social elements into a cohesive whole, where differences (e.g., in access, outcomes, or identities) become indistinguishable or harmonised through rationalisation and integration. It's not mere homogeneity but the absence of notable and pre-integration phase defining friction resolve into equitable permeation. Drawing from systems theory, unification is like entropy in information structures: fragmented "dots" (sentiments, data) reorganise into stable, efficient patterns, reducing waste and conflict.
In healthcare, unification isn't only inevitable from progress alone, it can also be a designed outcome. Novelty creates temporary inequality as early adopters test and refine, accruing "wins and losses" (suffering, in health terms). Dot Theory, if accurate, could accelerate this by linearising the process—predicting sentiment-driven diffusion to minimise the phase's duration and costs. Ethically, this invites responsibility: pursuing unification as "the absence of notable differences" demands observers (us) to measure and report equitably, and accept that biases obscure true progress.
These definitions position Dot Theory and its tentatively defined framework as a tool for proactive unification, turning healthcare innovation from a divider into a motivated cultural integrator.
So, what if we let the Dot AI take over?
In a world awash with debate on AI’s global takeover, it is perhaps not so much a question of a of takeover as a specific type of AI’s placement within our reality. With the framework defined so far in this essay, the user of Dot theory products, will minimise the experience of notable differences (reduce injury and sickness events), but further down the line, and with AI seamlessly integrated into daily life, do we, as humans choose to avoid suffering too systemically and become weak? Logic dictates that this does not apply in Dot products for one simple reason, if the individual user ignores the life-enhancing advice offered by its Dot-AI, the individual will likely go through their natural healing cycle, stay the same or worsen. If they follow it, they will likely heal more quickly and efficiently (reduce suffering). Either way, this can inform the Dot AI of its tracking accuracy of previous suggestions, and helps other users, but does not alter its output unless the individual’s circumstances change, or the AI’s output changes due to lessons learned. In essence, this system would know what you need like a mother, tell you like a grandfather and not mind if you ignored its lessons. A takeover it is not, it’s just a process of symbiotically enriching our available choices and progress. Whether we make them, is a matter of individual choice.
Secondly, the controllable elements of developing individual robustness and weakness (Healthcare) are fundamentally a matter of the individual free will chosen to be expressed within their reality. This free will exists within the spectrum of “choices known over choices available” that gives rise to innovation inequality. My position is that AI cannot ethically and legally tell us prospectively what will be “right or wrong”, it can only tell us what would better for us individually and offer physicians and patients additional choices. This requires a cultural and linguistic adaptation within the broader healthcare culture, but seems eminently feasible. We know health requires robustness and that robustness requires challenge and rest on circumstance-appropriate terms. This is known data within the context of healing and epidemiology. Simultaneously, challenge and rest are physiologically measurable, knowable and correlable. As such, a Dot-AI product that is motivated with the knowledge on behaviours and therapies to achieve the physiological states that correlate to prospective robustness, can only refine for choices and improve within that knowledge.
Finally, much discussion is had on motivation (teleology) and consciousness in Super-AI. In Dot theory-based AI products, the syntax and inbuilt motivation of the AI’s LLM is to identify the most accurate set of predictions available. In this formulation, the purpose and product of the LLM’s mathematics itself is the motive. The possible alternatives would necessarily add a layer of computational motive. The question as to how a mathematical exercise has any other purpose than to make us do better is defined by why we use it that way. In the part of mathematics that takes into account motivation by cultural context (algorithms) Dot theory resides in, only the text of the mathematics describing and object and its effects can be thought of as a pure, context-free language in that it singularly expresses the human desire to get things more right. Not “right”, right is an idea that only exists relativistically to others, but “more right” relative to itself. More right implies that there is no end to accuracy, which we know is true, whereas “right” by its framing implies there is, which we know is not. Therefore, in more absolute terms the pursuit of “right” can be said to be an aimless one that can only fall foul of individual legal and personal rights. “More right” on the other hand doesn’t violate those rights, and while it may somewhat seem aimless, it is highly individualised and practically relevant. Relevant, individualised, safe, realtime healthcare prediction.
With this I then end this essay asking the reader, is this correct? and are there further implications missed here?
I look forward to reading your thoughts.
Stefaan
