BONUS The Future of Seeing—Why AI Vision Will Transform Medicine and Human Perception With Daniel Sodickson

BONUS: The Future of Seeing—Why AI Vision Will Transform Medicine and Human Perception

What if the next leap in AI isn't about thinking, but about seeing? In this episode, Daniel Sodickson—physicist, medical imaging pioneer, and author of "The Future of Seeing"—argues we're on the edge of a vision revolution that will change medicine, technology, and even human perception itself.

From Napkin Sketch to Parallel Imaging

"I was doodling literally on a napkin in a piano bar in Boston and came up with a way to get multiple lines at once. I ran to my mentor and said, 'Hey, I have this idea, never mind my paper.' And he said, 'Who are you again? Sure, why not.' And it worked."

Daniel's journey into imaging began with a happy accident. While studying why MRI couldn't capture the beating heart fast enough, he realized the fundamental bottleneck: MRI machines scan one line at a time, like old CRT screens. His insight—imaging in parallel to capture multiple lines simultaneously—revolutionized the field. This connection between natural vision (our eyes capture entire scenes at once) and artificial imaging systems set him on a 29-year journey exploring how we can see what was once invisible.

Upstream AI: Changing What We Measure

"Most often when we envision AI, we think of it as this downstream process. We generate our data, make our image, then let AI loose instead of our brains. To me, that's limited. Why aren't we thinking of tasks that AI can do that no human could ever do?"

Daniel introduces a crucial distinction between "downstream" and "upstream" AI. Downstream AI takes existing images and interprets them—essentially competing with human experts. Upstream AI changes the game entirely by redesigning what data we gather in the first place. If we know a machine learning system will process the output, we can build cheaper, more accessible sensors. Imagine monitoring devices built into beds or chairs that don't produce perfect images but can detect whether you've changed since your last comprehensive scan. AI fills in the gaps using learned context about how bodies and signals behave.

The Power of Context and Memory

"The world we see is a lie. Two eyes are not nearly enough to figure out exactly where everything is in space. What the brain is doing is using everything it's learned about the world—how light falls on surfaces, how big people are compared to objects—and filling in what's missing."

Our brains don't passively receive images; they actively construct reality using massive amounts of learned context. Daniel argues we can give imaging machines the same superpower. By training AI on temporal patterns—how healthy bodies change over time, what signals precede disease—we create systems with "memory" that can make sophisticated judgments from incomplete data. Today's signal, combined with your history and learned patterns from millions of others, becomes far more informative than any single pristine image could be.

From Reactive to Proactive Health

"I've started to wonder why we use these amazing MRI machines only once we already know you're sick. Why do we use them reactively rather than proactively?"

This question drove Daniel to leave academia after 29 years and join Function Health, a company focused on proactive imaging and testing to catch disease before it develops. The vision: a GPS for your health. By combining regular blood panels, MRI scans, and wearable data, AI can monitor whether you look like yourself or have changed in worrisome ways. The goal isn't replacing expert diagnosis but creating an early warning system that surfaces problems while they're still easily treatable.

Seeing How We See

"Sometimes when I'm walking along, everything I'm seeing just fades away. And what I see instead is how I'm seeing. I imagine light bouncing off of things and landing in my eye, this buzz of light zipping around as fast as anything in the universe can go."

After decades studying vision, Daniel experiences the world differently. He finds himself deconstructing his own perception—tracing sight lines, marveling at how we've evolved to turn chaos of sensation into spatially organized information. This meta-awareness extends to his work: every new imaging modality has driven scientific discovery, from telescopes enabling the Copernican Revolution to MRI revealing the living body. We're now at another inflection point where AI doesn't just interpret images but transforms our relationship with perception itself.

In this episode, we refer to An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Young on animal perception, and A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence by Yann LeCun on building AI more like the brain.

About Daniel Sodickson

Daniel K. Sodickson is a physicist in medicine and chief medical scientist at Function Health. Previously at NYU, and a gold medalist and past president of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, he pioneers AI-driven imaging and is author of The Future of Seeing.